10 things we learned from F1's 2025 Japanese Grand Prix
The Japanese Grand Prix revealed plenty about 2025 F1 car (and driver) performance
A hugely controversial decision was immediately justified at Formula 1’s Japanese Grand Prix, which was deceptively interesting on and off track beyond a stagnant Sunday afternoon.
Here’s everything we learned at Suzuka.
F1's best car got stuck in 'rabbit hole'
The fastest car at Suzuka didn’t win the race. It wasn’t even on pole.
That was partly because of Red Bull getting its own car into close enough territory to let Max Verstappen’s genius do the rest. But it was also down to McLaren underachieving.
McLaren team boss Andrea Stella admits its car is still the best in F1. But because neither driver nailed their final Q3 lap, Verstappen stole pole, and at Suzuka it was impossible for McLaren to show off its main car advantages.
That left McLaren, to quote Stella, stuck in a “rabbit hole”. The car’s full potential wasn’t reached on Saturday, then couldn’t be tapped into on Sunday.
McLaren has a small but decisive edge on pace, maybe a tenth of a second or two, but even if it can be bigger than that in race trim it still wasn’t enough to follow closely and pass at this track.
The other, more critical advantage is tyre management. But this was also negated because the resurfaced Suzuka circuit made it an extremely low degradation race for everyone, which is a key factor in why it was so boring to watch.
Red Bull holding on for rule change
A consistent message within the Red Bull camp at Suzuka was that it just needed to hang in long enough in the title fight for the flexi-wing clampdown coming at round nine at Barcelona at the start of June.
Red Bull knows Verstappen alone is its best chance at a championship. He is in electric form and has probably not left a better result on the table this year, which means he’s now just one point behind Lando Norris in the standings.
But he needs help to stay in contention all season long, let alone win. And Red Bull’s convinced that the rule change that will be in force in June will have an impact, even if it’s not 100% sure how much - so it feels this first third of the season is all about staying in the fight.
Before Red Bull and Verstappen turned things around at Suzuka and won, their trickier than hoped for start to the season was framed against the expectation of fighting for both titles this season.
But Red Bull is still a one-driver team in championship terms after Yuki Tsunoda’s point-less debut, and that means it is already 50 points behind McLaren in the constructors’. And two titles aren’t really Red Bull’s focus - its messaging at Suzuka was all about supporting Max.
Red Bull senior motorsport advisor Helmut Marko has said “the whole team is focused” on a fifth title for Max. Team boss Christian Horner confirmed “our priority is the drivers’ championship” and also said at Suzuka: “Max is the lead driver and Yuki's job is to support him as best as he can to retain that drivers' championship.”
This reflects the reality that Verstappen is Red Bull’s main hope, even if it won’t officially give up on the constructors’.
Hamilton 'deficit' exposed Ferrari's main sensitivity
Ferrari endured another challenging time in Japan as it was not able to match the pace of the leading Red Bull and McLaren cars.
But it was a weekend that perhaps finally confirmed that the team is facing a particular sensitivity in being able to run the car within the ride height range it would like.
A fortnight on from Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification from the Chinese Grand Prix for a worn plank, where Ferrari had pitched its ride height too low, the seven-time champion revealed in Japan that his team had had to be conservative and raise its car at Suzuka to avoid repeat trouble.
This has further hampered a characteristic of the car where Ferrari is battling the compromises between low-speed and high-speed ride heights – and it is this which holds the key to a decent step forward.
Speaking to Sky after the race, in comments that left an awful lot open to interpretation, Hamilton said: “We found something on the car that's been underperforming the last three races. I'm really hoping that when that's fixed, I'll start getting a bit better results.
“I'm losing just over a tenth a lap with this issue we have. I'm hoping in the next race it's fixed.”
Ferrari is understood to be working on a solution that can help it maintain its low-speed strengths but then still get the car into the right operating window for the quick stuff.
Master that and, while the lap times gains will not be significant, with things as close as they are in F1, it could be enough to get Ferrari back in the mix at the front.
Red Bull's controversial switch was right
Although Red Bull’s wider decision-making process remains baffling given how quickly it abandoned Liam Lawson, Suzuka indicated the decision to swap him and Yuki Tsunoda was the right one.
Neither had a good weekend on paper, with Tsunoda finishing 12th and Lawson 15th, but both showed good pace despite not stringing together the weekend as well as they should have done.
Tsunoda immediately looked more at home in the Red Bull RB21 than Lawson did, making good progress through practice. He then as-good-as matched Verstappen in Q1. But in Q2, he had just one set of fresh softs to use and didn’t get the tyres in the right window, leading to wheelspin off the chicane and a snap at Turn 2.
But despite that, he feels, justifiably, that he made a good start.
Lawson had the easier assignment, jumping into the Racing Bulls VCARB 02 that he confirmed had a wider window than the Red Bull. And while he couldn’t join Isack Hadjar in Q2, he did show signs of having the pace to do – and he at least outqualified Tsunoda.
A strategy gamble in the race, running long and mediums and switching to softs, left him only 17th.
More will be expected from both in Bahrain, but both showed underlying promise at Suzuka despite not executing as well as they should have done.
Turnaround matters more than Antonelli records
Kimi Antonelli became the youngest driver to lead a Formula 1 race, and to set the fastest lap, in the Japanese GP. But the substance of the 18-year-old’s weekend was a lot more significant than those records, nice as they are to have.
Antonelli pulled off quite a turnaround for qualifying. He had been lost in practice, clearly lacking the confidence of Mercedes team-mate George Russell in the high-speed first sector, and unsure why he didn’t seem to be improving after the first session.
By his own admission, Antonelli was struggling a lot, and had to dig quite deep into his driving. He got a lot of help from Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes’ reserve driver, assisting with lines and approach and what he could do better.
Antonelli is not just an extremely gifted driver but an intelligent one and a hard worker, and he needed all of that to untangle the mess he was in just in time for qualifying. Which he did - although Antonelli still wasn’t on Russell’s level, he went from being at a serious risk of not even being in Q3 to earning his best qualifying result yet in F1 to start on the same row as his team-mate in sixth.
That it saved a weekend that was going nowhere fast and set up a good race with strong tyre management and an attacking final stint that, even if it didn’t change his result (sixth again), will give him a lot of knowledge and confidence early in his rookie season.
Racing Bulls is the strongest midfielder
The Racing Bulls car looks like the strongest midfielder. Note, we aren’t necessarily saying fastest, even though the VCARB 02 has been the quickest midfield qualifier for all three grands prix so far!
It’s certainly a car that’s quick and consistent across a broad range of conditions. While that didn’t translate to results in Australia and China thanks to strategic blunders, Hadjar put the car to good use by qualifying seventh and finishing eighth in Japan.
So far, the other contender for best midfield runner has been Williams. And given how tricky the Williams was at Suzuka, Alex Albon declared it second-best in that group.
And it’s the fact the VCARB 02 appears to be a consistent and benign car that means, right now, it’s the car of choice in that pack.
After all, Suzuka is a tough test of a car aerodynamically and being so competitive there having also shown well on very different tracks in Australia and China makes it a formidable package in F1’s ‘Class B’.
A very risky Haas upgrade worked
Suzuka was a tale of two weekends for the Haas drivers as Ollie Bearman excelled with a risky, shortcut floor development to help cure the car’s main problem - but Esteban Ocon toiled.
Haas brought revised floors for both cars to Suzuka that were designed and built before testing the solution in the windtunnel.
That was because of an aerodynamic problem that left it miserably uncompetitive in Melbourne, and a high likelihood of it reoccurring at Suzuka after the track layout and surface at Shanghai meant the issue didn’t appear there.
On Friday, Haas kept Ocon on the old floor for the two practice sessions, with Bearman using the new one, and gradually went more aggressive with its set-up before firmly concluding that the revised floor had helped while the old one did indeed experience some of the Melbourne issues.
So, both cars were on the new floor for the rest of the weekend. Bearman made it into Q3 and scored a point in the race but Ocon was anonymous, qualifying and finishing 18th.
Ocon hinted after qualifying and the grand prix that the new floor hadn’t helped his car the same way. He said after qualifying “it just didn't improve as much as it should've done”, and after the race that “it worked on one car”.
But team boss Ayao Komatsu said the data showed the benefit was there in both, so this just looked like a tricky event for Ocon for a different reason - one Haas seemed to not understand by the end of the weekend.
Engine keeps Alpine point-less
There’s only one point-less team after three races and that’s Alpine.
OK, this was the case after Shanghai too, so that in itself is nothing new. But Suzuka was a track where Alpine had the potential to score for the first time in 2025 - except a familiar old weakness let it down.
Pierre Gasly was a clear top 10 threat in practice but couldn’t quite make it into Q3 when everything was turned up to the maximum for qualifying. A tricky race followed and meant after starting on the fringes in 11th, Gasly fell away from the points rather than challenged.
The culprit? Well, it wasn’t a perfect grand prix by driver or team, as Gasly lost a place at the start, and there was a slow pitstop. But this track highlighted the extent of the engine deficit that has long held Alpine back on certain circuits.
In qualifying, at least a couple of tenths were dropped on the straights just through a sheer lack of grunt, and in the race the energy recovery system isn’t strong enough to cope with the demands of three long full throttle zones.
At Suzuka, Alpine’s car was potentially the fifth-fastest in the corners. But its package wasn’t good enough overall - leaving it with the weird juxtaposition of being rock bottom in the championship despite clearly having a car to fight consistently around the top 10.
Clue for Aston Martin problem
Aston Martin failed to add to its points tally in Japan, as Lance Stroll had a torrid time to finish last and Fernando Alonso failed to make it into the top 10.
But the squad left feeling that the weekend may have perhaps unlocked some answers about just what is wrong with its AMR25 and why its drivers are lacking confidence.
Some strong pace shown on Friday, even if the afternoon session’s speed was disguised by the red flag chaos, was followed by much bigger headaches for the remainder of the weekend as the car seemed to be in a totally different performance window from Saturday morning.
Stroll qualified dead last while Alonso hustled his car as much as he could but it was not enough for Q3.
The team has suspicions that its difficulties were triggered by the 180-degree change of wind direction from Friday into Saturday – which made its car go from looking decent to being a bit of a handful, and suddenly bouncing again.
It points to some extreme aero sensitivities, but the shift was big enough to give Aston Martin reason to feel that finding out what happened can help it pinpoint just what is wrong with its car.
Team boss Andy Cowell said: “We need to learn what it is that a wind direction changes with regards to car performance.”
“It’s a figure of eight circuit so you can’t just go blaming the wind direction, but that's the only thing that was spotted that changed.
“But is there something else that we changed on the car set-up that changed the confidence of the drivers?”
F1's V10 idea is heading for a showdown
F1’s ongoing debate about V10s looks to be further ramping up, with it emerging in Japan that manufacturers have been called to a meeting with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem at the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Taking place on the Friday of the F1 weekend, the aim of the get together is to help the FIA better understand where the carmakers see the future direction for engines – and for the governing body to explain why it feels action needs to be taken to bring costs down.
But while Ben Sulayem may be hoping that his push to deliver a future engine roadmap that secures F1’s future can get rolling, The Race understands that there is far from the consensus that he wants.
While Ferrari and Red Bull are believed to be in favour of the change and as early as 2028/2029, and Mercedes open-minded to discuss things, Audi and Honda appear to have dug in and are not interested in wavering from the next generation turbo hybrid engines.
With any plan to alter the rules before 2031 requiring support from four of the current five manufacturers, two outliers are enough to kill it off.
Ben Sulayem is not the sort of person who happily gives things up without a fight though, which means it will be fascinating to see if any concessions are put on the table to try to win over the sceptics.
