At the twenty-first Grand Prix of 2025, Lando Norris he won the sprint race on Saturday and the test on Sunday. It was a remarkable return to victory at the Autódromo José Carlos Pace at Interlagos for McLaren F1 Team, since 2012, the year of the Woking team’s last signing thanks to one of the sport’s last signings, Jenson Button.
Andrea Kimi took the podium with him Antonelli and Max Verstappen. This was good news for the Bolognese driver: in the same year that he made his debut in Formula 1, while still in high school, he had taken home third and second place. Despite some difficulties in the early stages of the season, his contract has been reconfirmed and his morale has also risen: today was the best result of his career for him. Something that catches your attention, especially thinking about other people’s misfortunes, especially those related to Scuderia Ferrari’s double retirement.
Third place Max Verstappen This is actually bitter and sweet news. On the one hand, this is something extraordinary: only eight drivers in history have managed to start from the pits and finish on the podium. He did so as a desperate move: after qualifying in sixteenth position, his team decided it was time to replace the engine and transmission, receiving a penalty for exceeding the number of replacements for these components in the season. You can’t say that it didn’t go well or that I didn’t struggle. It’s just that, due to the clear superiority of his opponents – understood to be McLaren already holding the constructors’ title – he wasn’t even able to catch the two drivers’ championship leaders on this lap, but only limited the damage. Or rather: he was only chasing Oscar Piastri, while Norris, who had been first for weeks, continued his own run. However, fate seemed fair to Piastri, who lost heavily to the Dutchman, but – on the other hand – many expected divine punishment from him.
In the early stages In fact, after an orderly start and stable weather conditions, no one doubted the escape of Norris, who had started from pole position. But surprisingly, even the first pursuer was calm at first. However, the calm was only apparent: the safety car, due to a bad crash carried out by the completely independent Gabriel Bortoleto, was enough to shuffle the cards. The key episode of the whole Sunday happened there: Piastri, on the restart, tried to make the most of it considering that he theoretically had to recover at least three positions, but clumsily “hooked” the innocent Antonelli who in turn touched Charles Leclerc a lot. The Ferrari driver faced the worst fate: going off the track and irreparable damage to the wheels and suspension. The Beginning of the Maranello Disaster: not long afterward Lewis Hamilton crashed into an opponent, also damaging his own wing. After serving a five-second penalty in the pits, he chose to retire. Another sad page for Ferrari fans and especially for Hamilton’s morale, while Leclerc, at least at the moment, has nothing to feel guilty about.
Ferrari disaster it also has other dimensions. Verstappen, with his 15 points as the naughty knight who almost always kept to himself, allowed Red Bull Racing to overtake Ferrari into third place in the constructors’ standings. As we head towards the end of the year, with three races remaining, it is worth highlighting that it would be almost impossible to do worse than this for the Maranello team in this area, given that direct pursuers in fifth place, Williams Racing, have an unbridgeable gap of two hundred and fifty points. This “soup” for Verstappen also worsened the bad mood of the seven-time British champion from Maranello, who since 2014 has held a quite large and rare record, namely getting on the podium after starting from the pitlane.
