by F1 correspondent Michael Butterworth
BEIJING, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Formula 1's 2025 season arrived with the promise of stability yet delivered a year shaped by fluctuating form, shifting power structures and the first real sense that the current competitive order is no longer fixed in place.
McLaren ultimately converted potential into titles as Max Verstappen flirted with an improbable comeback, and Mercedes continued its slow climb back toward respectability. Ferrari faltered, Williams impressed, and a cluster of rookies hinted that the future might yet be brighter than the present.
In part two of this season review, Xinhua looks at the teams who finished first to fourth in the 2025 Constructors' Championship, with some teams and drivers scaling new heights and tasting the champagne glories, while others licked their wounds after plumbing the depths of despair.
MCLAREN
McLaren finally converted promise into silverware, taking its first drivers' and constructors' double since 1998 with a car that was plainly the class of the field. Even so, the sense lingered that the team tried to make life harder for itself, clinging to strict equality between its drivers and bleeding points through strategy calls that felt oddly tentative for an outfit of such pedigree.
Lando Norris leaves the season as the new world champion, though he spent the first part of it looking like a man trying to make sense of his machinery. He admitted early on that the MCL39 was not behaving as he wanted, and he did nothing to help himself with a clumsy qualifying crash in Saudi Arabia and a needless scrape with teammate Oscar Piastri in Canada. For long stretches he looked brittle, and his uncertainty provided Piastri with the room to seize the initiative with four wins from the opening six races.
The tide eventually turned. A mid-season upgrade package hit the mark and Piastri's form deserted him at the very moment Norris steadied his own hands. Once the title fight inverted, Norris drove with a clarity that had been missing earlier in the campaign, with his wins in Mexico and Brazil carrying a finality that suggested he had at last made peace with the car beneath him.
Piastri is left to brood on a season that he controlled for longer than anyone else. After Zandvoort, he sat 34 points clear and looked every inch a future champion. Then came Baku. A wretched weekend there opened the door to five races without a podium, and by the time he rediscovered his rhythm it was too late. At least he finished strongly in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, though he may spend the winter wondering how a campaign that had seemed so composed could unravel with such speed.
MERCEDES
Mercedes climbed from fourth to second in the constructors' standings, though the one-point improvement on 2024 underlined the extent to which it is still a long way from the team it once was.
With Lewis Hamilton having defected to Ferrari, George Russell assumed the mantle of lead driver with consummate ease, taking polished wins in Canada and Singapore and generally getting more out of the W15 than it deserved. Watching him drag a nearly-there car onto the podium with stubborn regularity, it became hard not to imagine what he might have achieved had he been driving a McLaren.
Hamilton's abrupt exit accelerated Kimi Antonelli's promotion from theory to practice. The teenager arrived with a formidable billing but soon learned how unforgiving F1's midfield can be. A barren mid-season stretch prompted team boss Toto Wolff to administer a very public hurry up, and though the Italian steadied himself late in the campaign, he was overshadowed in the rookie stakes by Isack Hadjar and Ollie Bearman. If Mercedes' 2026 power unit delivers what the whispers suggest, he will have nowhere to hide.
The broader relief in Brackley comes from finally closing the book on a regulation cycle that reduced a serial title winner to sporadic opportunism. If talk that Mercedes has stolen a march on its rivals with next year's power unit proves true, Russell may finally have a car worthy of his ambitions.
RED BULL
Red Bull discovered in 2025 that even dynasties creak. The RB21 carried a queasy mix of ride imbalance and tire fragility that left Max Verstappen second-guessing his own reflexes through the early months. Once the car steadied itself mid-season, the Dutchman went back to treating Sunday afternoons like an exercise in inevitability. As McLaren contrived to throw points away, a title charge that had looked fanciful when Verstappen was more than 100 points down began to gather an unnerving momentum.
In the end he missed out by two points, although the shape of the season left little doubt over who had done the finest driving. Six victories in the final nine races put him in the company of Fernando Alonso in 2012, a year where the best driver also left without the crown. Verstappen may have fallen short of a fifth straight championship, but he produced a season that will be talked about long after the statistics lose their shine.
The same script did not apply in the other garage. Liam Lawson was shuffled aside after two races in favor of Yuki Tsunoda, who found the senior team every bit as unforgiving as advertised. The car's razor edge exposed every limitation and he never once made it look like a front-running machine. His eventual removal felt inevitable, and although he remains on the books as a reserve, his prospects of returning to the grid appear faint.
The greater tremors came away from the tarmac. Christian Horner's abrupt mid-season dismissal ended a 20-year stretch in charge without the courtesy of a tidy explanation. Controversial advisor Helmut Marko also retired at season's end, closing the book on a peculiar era of mentorship and mayhem. Adrian Newey had already decamped to Aston Martin, and Honda's exit clears the way for Ford's return after two decades in the wilderness.
Thus, Red Bull walks into 2026 with a driver operating at the top of his game, but a leadership unrecognizable from the one that built the empire. For the first time in a long while, the drinks-backed outfit feels like a team in the early stages of becoming something else.
FERRARI
2025 was a chastening year for Ferrari, winless for the first time in half a decade and sliding to fourth in the constructors' championship. For a team that still trades on grandeur and mythology, it was an unromantic statistic and a damaging one for Fred Vasseur. The decision to recruit Lewis Hamilton, framed as a statement of intent, has delivered little return, and Ferrari's record offers scant protection to team principals when results fall away.
In his seventh season at Maranello, Charles Leclerc carried himself like a man who has learned precisely how little margin for error Ferrari affords its own drivers. The Monegasque produced a run of impressive performances, frequently hustling the SF-25 ahead of quicker cars, and doing so with a new sobriety. The rash errors that once padded his highlight reels have largely disappeared, replaced by a colder, more economical form of excellence. One suspects he may be quietly questioning the wisdom of signing a contract extension said to tie him to Ferrari until 2029.
If Leclerc resembled a driver mastering adversity, Hamilton looked increasingly like one being worn down by it. His arrival at Ferrari following 12 years at Mercedes had dominated the sport's conversation in 2024 but the reality has proved grim. An unremarkable opening to 2025 slid into something altogether bleaker in the second half, with Hamilton often marooned among the slowest five in qualifying and sounding genuinely perplexed by his own lack of pace.
The confidence ebbed, the radio messages curdled, and even the promise of new regulations in 2026 failed to stir him, as Hamilton spoke openly of not looking forward to the future - a striking confession from a driver once animated by the idea of reinvention.
The numbers remain unimpeachable: seven world titles, 105 victories, and a career that rewrote the sport's record books. Yet there is little room for sentiment in F1, and too many anonymous and subdued weekends are threatening to tarnish a once imperious reputation. Like Bjorn Borg with his wooden racket, Hamilton too often looked a champion trying to impose yesterday's instincts on a sport that has long since moved on. ■
