The 2025 Formula 1 season has reached the Summer Shutdown.
Making it a perfect time to pause, and declare some early winners and losers.
Today we’ll look at six winners from the first half of the season, a collection of teams, drivers and yes, a toy company, that stole the show over the first 14 race weekends.
Photo by Mark Sutton – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
2024 was a dream season for McLaren, as they rocketed up the standings over the second half of the schedule to capture their first Constructors’ title since 1998.
The alarm clock has yet to go off to wake Team Papaya up from that dream.
McLaren entered the 2025 season as the favorites to repeat as Constructors’ Champions, and they have lived up to those expectations. Lando Norris’ win in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, coupled with a hard-fought points finish from Oscar Piastri after the hometown hero found the grass in wet conditions, was enough to see McLaren leave Melbourne level with Mercedes atop the standings, but with a tiebreaker advantage thanks to Norris’ win.
Since then, they have not looked back, recording a combined 11 Grand Prix wins between Piastri and Norris (including Norris’ win in Melbourne) and 24 combined Grand Prix podiums, roaring into the break with four consecutive one-two finishes. That brought their total number of front-row lockouts to seven on the season, their highest mark since Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna recorded that many in 1988.
After 14 race weekends their lead over second-place Ferrari is 299 points, on par with the 310-point advantage Red Bull enjoyed over Mercedes after 14 races in their dominant 2023 campaign.
Add to all this the fact that Piastri and Norris have likely turned the fight for the Drivers’ Championship into a two-man race, and you have a season to remember in the works at Woking.
Oscar Piastri’s form has taken a significant leap forward, putting him atop the Drivers’ Championship standings at the Summer Shutdown.
After winning a pair of grands prix last season, Piastri secured six wins over the first 14 races, bringing his points total to 284, just eight short of his 2024 mark. He enters the break with a nine-point lead over teammate Lando Norris in the title race, giving him a slight advantage in the title chase.
There is a long way to go until a champion is crowned, but the Oscar Piastri we saw over the first half of the season can certainly lift the big trophy by the end of the season.
Lando Norris entered the 2025 season as the odds-on favorite to win the F1 Drivers’ Championship after falling short of Max Verstappen a season ago, and his win in Melbourne certainly got his title chase off to a roaring start.
While it has been more of an up-and-down campaign when contrasted with what his teammate has done — including a difficult moment in Montreal when he clashed with Piastri in the closing laps of the Canadian Grand Prix — Norris is still just nine points behind his teammate as the second half looms. He also secured two major wins, taking the Monaco Grand Prix and then winning his home race at Silverstone, among the five Grand Prix victories over the first 14 race weekends on his 2025 resume.
Can he catch Piastri? Certainly. Will he? We’ll find out over the second half of the season.
Let’s have some fun for a moment.
Although not nearly as much fun as the grid had in the buildup to the Miami Grand Prix.
The drivers’ parade looked a little different as the grid wound around Hard Rock Stadium in May, as the 20 drivers climbed into life-sized LEGO F1 cars for a lap unlike any other. If you had any doubt over how much the drivers themselves loved this event, just watch the onboard cameras and see how veterans, including Fernando Alonso, Max Verstappen, and Lewis Hamilton, turned into kids again.
It’s 15 minutes of pure joy.
And an epic win from the first half of the season.
Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images
2024 was a difficult season for the team at Sauber. The year began with struggles in pit lane — exemplified by a 52-second pit stop for Valtteri Bottas at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix as the team dealt with a wheel nut issue — and they did not secure their first points until the Qatar Grand Prix, where Zhou Guanyu finished eighth to bank four points for the team.
The only four they scored all season.
This year began with a new driver lineup (veteran Nico Hülkenberg and rookie Gabriel Bortoleto), and the turnaround has been dramatic. Sauber sits seventh in the standings with 51 points, just one point behind sixth-place Aston Martin and 29 points behind fifth-place Williams, putting them squarely in the midfield fight.
A big chunk of those points came from Hülkenberg’s third-place finish at the British Grand Prix, a result that marked the veteran’s first podium result in his 239th start in F1. But also notable is what Bortoleto has done in recent weeks, as the rookie finished eighth in the Austrian Grand Prix, ninth in the Belgian Grand Prix, and a career-best sixth in the Hungarian Grand Prix, all three results coming in the four most recent races.
Sauber brought a significant upgrade package to the Spanish Grand Prix (where Hülkenberg finished fifth), and that package has given the team momentum heading into the second half of the season, and a chance to finish as high as fifth depending on results.
They also have the wind at their backs heading into 2026, when they become the Audi works operation.
After taking a step forward in 2023 when they finished seventh in the Constructors’ Championship standings, Williams came back to Earth a bit in 2024. Logan Sargeant was dropped by the team following the Dutch Grand Prix and replaced by Franco Colapinto, who showed flashes over his first four starts — including an eighth-place finish in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix — but stumbled down the stretch.
Even with a solid season from Alexander Albon, Williams limped to a ninth-place finish.
But James Vowles scored perhaps the biggest win of the driver transfer market (putting Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari aside) when he inked Carlos Sainz Jr. to a new contract.
At the moment, Williams sits fifth in the standings with 70 points, buoyed by 54 from Albon alone, a mark that has put him back into the conversation regarding a potential move to another team. However, Albon insists that his future lies at Williams, as he told RacingNews365 in a recent interview.
“I want to see the fruits of where we get to. I feel like we made it. When I look at us compared to other teams, maybe you can remove or add McLaren, but McLaren have had the consistency, and they’ve had their sparks throughout the years,” began Albon.
”When I look at Williams and look at the trajectory that we’ve been on, I don’t think there’s another team that have just gone year on year, just this consecutive steep climb.
“And I feel like, rightly or wrongly, I’ve been a part of that process, and I want to see us go the whole way.”
Holding onto fifth in the Constructors’ Championship race would be a huge step in that process.
