Winners and losers from F1's 2025 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix

While hardly the most chaotic Saudi Arabian Grand Prix ever, the fifth round of Formula 1's 2025 season still had plenty of room for a decent mix of standout drives and Sundays to forget.

Here are our picks for the main winners and losers:

Winner - Oscar Piastri

Grand prix win number five for Oscar Piastri and the championship lead for the very first time.

Piastri wasn’t devastatingly fast all weekend. If anything, he was arguably the second fastest McLaren driver and Max Verstappen pipped him to pole in arguably a slower Red Bull.

But Piastri was note perfect on Sunday. He was superb in battle with Verstappen down to Turn 1, staying on track with a forceful move that baited Verstappen into earning a penalty. 

Thereafter, he kept Verstappen in range, put in the necessary outlaps after the earlier pitstop and was faultless in his race management thereafter.   

"He looks like a veteran," claims his McLaren team boss Andrea Stella, despite only being in his 51st F1 race weekend. And it’s very hard to disagree. - Josh Suttill

Loser - Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton finished 31 seconds behind his team-mate on Sunday, which would be easier to take if it wasn't, all in all, a fair reflection of the weekend he'd put together.

Jeddah has not been his friend at all in the ground effect era. But if we're talking ground effect era, the Ferrari version of Hamilton is supposed to be different to the Mercedes version of Hamilton in this ruleset.

So far, save for that initial burst in China... it really doesn't look like it, does it? - Val Khorounzhiy

Loser - Yuki Tsunoda 

Yuki Tsunoda looked on course for another solid Red Bull weekend. He’d qualified decently and you have to imagine he could have been in the mix to at least beat the best of the midfield cars, eighth-placed Carlos Sainz. 

But we’ll never know because of that race-ending opening lap shunt with Pierre Gasly. It couldn’t have felt more like a racing incident if it tried, but it undoubtedly leaves him as a loser. 

It also leaves Tsunoda with an unrepresentative haul of just two points from what’s been a decent start to life in the senior team across the triple-header. - JS

Winner - Williams

Williams not only got the best available points on offer for a midfield team in Jeddah, but did so in a very publicly impressive way.

Its cars would've both finished a place lower had it not orchestrated the final stint by asking Sainz to keep Alex Albon consistently in DRS range as Isack Hadjar's Racing Bulls chased them. 

It wasn't the most complicated strategy, but still one that took a lot of faith in its drivers - and specifically in Sainz's ability to see the bigger picture.

It helps too that it was the most complete weekend so far by the team's big-name signing. - VK

Loser - Lance Stroll

After an encouraging first couple of races, Lance Stroll unfortunately regressed to being anonymous in Saudi Arabia.

It’s not all his fault - the Aston Martin is probably only the ninth-best car on the 2025 grid on average so far, and both drivers lapped slower in qualifying this year around Jeddah than they managed in 2024 - Fernando Alonso by half a second (Q2 versus his 2024 Q3 lap) and Stroll by four tenths (both Q1).

Yet another Q1 exit - his 75th - means Stroll now holds one of F1’s most unwanted records. His spiky, but not entirely unfair response: “Yeah... well, you put the McLaren drivers in a Sauber for 10 years and they will have the most Q1 exits. It's car-dependent.”

To a point, Lance, yes, the trouble is you were beaten by one of those Saubers in the race, and moreover, your team-mate did so much more with that car than you did this weekend. - Ben Anderson

Winner - Red Bull's turnaround

This could be another Verstappen winner entry - we end up doing a fair bit of those - but while he remains the only driver capable of extracting top-level performance from the Red Bull, this was one of those rare races that he didn't win but managed to prove he could've won.

The performance picture from the race strongly suggests Verstappen would've won had he stayed in front legally at Turns 1-2. It will sting, thus, that he didn't, but considering the Red Bull even in his hands looked the best part of a second off on the race runs on Friday, this had been another remarkable turnaround.

And after the lows of Bahrain, it's a weekend that has made a Red Bull RB21-powered drivers' title charge more believable again - even if the constructors' is so obviously a lost cause. - VK

Loser - Alpine

Alpine's six points so far this season are six more than its 2024 car had managed through the same number of grands prix - and that season turned out alright in the end.

"[It] does feel you need to grab these opportunities as soon as they're available - but I'm not too worried," said Gasly, out on the opening lap in a tangle with Tsunoda. 

"With the pace we have I'm confident that we'll be able to put ourselves in the mix in the next few weekends."

That may be so, but Williams and even Haas have been running up the score in the meantime, and Alpine - even engine-limited as it is - should at least be targeting those.

And it also needs more from its second car in the sessions that actually count. Jack Doohan's theoretical pace has generally not been far off Gasly's in 2025, but he has not really contributed in the most important sessions. That's generally normal for a rookie, but it'll have to change sooner rather than later - lest he repeat the Logan Sargeant trajectory, with the exact same outcome. - VK

Winner - Charles Leclerc

There's clearly a load of potential in that Ferrari - we keep seeing it in mid-race snatches, and always - China sprint apart - in Charles Leclerc's hands.

The fact it needs such a precise combination of circumstances to show that pace makes Leclerc's frustration after qualifying all the more understandable, and his charge to the podium today all the more impressive. - Matt Beer

Loser - Mercedes

Still a pretty comfortable second in the constructors' championship, but fifth and sixth - half a minute from the front - was a limp outcome for Mercedes, given how close George Russell got to pole.

That qualifying pace, how close Kimi Antonelli ended up to Russell (that Mercedes has a closer-matched driver line-up than Ferrari or Red Bull is a huge tribute to its teenage F1 novice), and the solid points haul are all positives. But this was a race spent mostly drifting backwards. - MB

Winner - Isack Hadjar

Hadjar clearly benefitted from a favourable strategy and will know two more positions could've potentially been on offer in terms of pure race pace - but even still this was another good, positive showing.

It is arguably worth less by itself than in the wider context that's forming around his 2025. Red Bull didn't seem too sold on Hadjar coming out of last year until circumstances opened an extra seat, but five races in, he is showing he's no unpolished talent but can genuinely be relied on at this level. - VK