MPH: F1 2025's competitive landscape after six races

Quarterway through the season, it’s a good time to assess the competitive landscape.

The structure, as ever, is dominated by car performance, but there have been some fascinating comparisons between team-mates too.

Headline number one is that McLaren, with what was already often the fastest car, has made bigger off-season gains than the other top three teams. It’s been the fastest car in all six circuits, with only the extent of that advantage being determined by track layouts and temperatures. At tracks demanding of rear tyre temperatures – Melbourne, Bahrain, Miami – its superiority has been huge.

At the one track where front tyre wear was the limitation – Shanghai – they were merely conclusively quickest. At the two tracks where track position was the dominant factor – Suzuka and Jeddah – it was very close between the McLarens and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.

At McLaren, Oscar Piastri’s Zen-like calm and his sniper moves in battle have won him even those weekends when Lando Norris has had more underlying pace (arguably Jeddah and Miami). But Piastri has also converted the weekends, when he has been the quicker driver (Bahrain, China). Norris’ performances have been more sensitive to how well the front of the car is working, the reduced pedal feedback from the added anti-dive suspension front geometry compromising his preferred heavily combined braking/cornering style.

Although Verstappen – and Verstappen alone – can make the Red Bull RB21 go very fast indeed when the corners are not too long and their speed spread not too great, it’s a very tricky drive, albeit in a quite different way from last year’s car.

This has been made even more difficult by how the car very often does not begin the weekend behaving in the way simulation suggested and the trackside team has become even more expert at teasing out the performance from the narrow window. But sometimes that window is simply tight shut – and even when it’s open, the performance can’t be maintained at McLaren levels of tyre control in the race. Nor can anyone else’s.

The Mercedes has been a more consistent performer than the Red Bull, but without the peak high-speed corner performance. George Russell started the season in fine team-leading form, and his second place with all sorts of car dramas in Jeddah really was a superlative performance. But the Miami Sprint pole gave an exciting first real glimpse of Kimi Antonelli’s huge potential.

Lewis Hamilton’s Sprint victory from pole in China was a false dawn of both his own form and that of the Ferrari. He’s made no secret of how difficult he’s finding things as Charles Leclerc has dominated him ever since Hamilton’s plank wear disqualification from the main race in China has impacted upon how the car needs to be set up in an extreme way to get around a fundamental rear end problem.

Carlos Sainz has suffered similar problems in adapting from Ferrari to Williams, specifically the speed range in which it responds well to combed braking and cornering. But in the last couple of events, he’s been generally on the pace of his team-mate even though Alexander Albon has been more assured in his performances as the incumbent driver.

The Williams is often head of the midfield behind the big four teams, but the Racing Bulls can be just as quick or quicker, with a very driveable chassis in which rookie Isack Hadjar is showing a real turn of impressive speed.

Alpine bounces between comfortably head of the midfield (Bahrain) and struggling to get out of Q1 (although the laptime gap between those two positions is very small). Rookie Jack Doohan didn’t get a good rub of the green there and showed that he could be Gasly-quick on occasion.

Ollie Bearman has regularly been super-impressive at Haas but the typical rookie peaks and troughs are evident alongside an experienced team-mate as Esteban Ocon. Sauber and Aston Martin have taken turns at being the slowest car, with the Aston in better shape when the corners are fast.

Within that structure, here are the qualifying performances of teams and team-mates for all the races (Sprints included). Race performances are in some cases rather different – the McLarens’ race day advantage is invariably bigger than in qualifying, for example – but the numbers at least give a useful baseline.

The car performance numbers are derived from the fastest time recorded by that car at each event, not from the combined performance of a team’s two cars.

Theoretical pole time 1m 26.674s (average of all eight pole times)

Team-mates (closest match-ups first)