The 2025 Formula 1 season reached its mid-point with a gloriously chaotic British Grand Prix.
From a first-time podium finisher, to the home victor, and a ‘catastrophic’ gamble gone wrong, here are our picks for the biggest winners and losers from the race.
Winner: Nico Hulkenberg – 3rd
Probably the feel-good result of the season means an awful lot to Hulkenberg and the legacy he’ll one day leave behind.
No more will it be a sorry tale of ‘great driver but never finished on the podium’, but a tale of perseverance, of a late-career flourish being rewarded.
Hulkenberg has been a standout in F1’s midfield since he returned with Haas. There have already been plenty of giant-killing performances without the result to match for both Haas and Sauber.
But now he’s got one with a first podium at attempt number 239. And the best thing? Given Sauber’s trajectory, even if another podium will be a stretch, there’s no reason why he can’t continue to be a regular top-10 finisher as he has been since Sauber’s Barcelona upgrade.
After all, he’s scored more points and the same number of podiums as Verstappen since then. – Josh Suttill
Loser: Max Verstappen – 5th
Question: You’re not one to have a moment in such conditions; rain is something you pray for all the time…
Max Verstappen: Not with that wing.
In analysing Verstappen’s magnificent pole lap, Mark Hughes asked whether the Red Bull driver would’ve had the car to do it with had he not chosen – “almost in desperation” – to go for a skinny rear wing, based on how ill-balanced the RB21 was on Friday.
Reflecting on that statement on Sunday begs another question: would Verstappen have been better-equipped to fight the McLarens in the grand prix without that low-downforce choice?
Maybe he wouldn’t have been up there in the first place, and maybe the McLaren was just too good on race day for any car or driver to contend with. Verstappen certainly thought so post-race.
But this was as uncharacteristic a performance as you’ll see from Verstappen. It says quite a lot that he felt fifth was “probably the best we could have done”. – Jack Cozens
Winner: Lando Norris – 1st
Even Norris admitted this was “maybe not the best way to win”, but he isn’t going to really care, and nor should he.
Championships are won just as much by dominating weekends as he did in Austria as they are by keeping a calm head and benefiting from your team-mate’s error, as Norris did here at Silverstone.
Norris weathered all the pressure of his home race – and grandstand – by holding his own well in early-race tussles with Lewis Hamilton and avoiding the error that cost Piastri dearly.
He knows things are far too close to take any kind of comfort from his first back-to-back victories this season, but Norris can take cutting the gap to Piastri from 22 points to eight in two races as a strong bounce back from his Montreal low. – JS
Loser: Oscar Piastri – 2nd
A very un-Piastri-like error that prompted very un-Piastri-like frustration post-race.
It’s by no means a disaster for his championship; he still leads, after all. But coming off second-best to his team-mate two races in a row – once in battle and the other in a game of not losing your head – leaves Piastri with work to do. – JS
Loser: Yuki Tsunoda – 15th
Any thoughts that an encouraging qualifying (with an unrepresentative end result of 11th) might be the basis for a stronger Sunday from Yuki Tsunoda were washed away as soon as the rain arrived on Sunday.
Which is perplexing, because Tsunoda said he had “good confidence” in those conditions.
But there was no redeeming quality about his race. Tsunoda accepted the blame for his penalty-inducing incident with Ollie Bearman – he might actually have been a little harsh on himself there as it didn’t seem like there was much else he could do – but even without that he’d have finished last.
Whether it was on slicks or intermediates, his pace was simply glacial – regularly the slowest in the field.
So even on a day where the weather created opportunities, even in a race with high attrition, and even with “not really that messy a race for myself”, Tsunoda never looked like scoring anything. – JC
Loser: Racing Bulls – DNF, DNF
Having led F1’s midfield in Austria, Racing Bulls didn’t even get a car past lap 17 with incidents for both Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar.
Lawson was a bit of an unfortunate passenger with two cars to his inside on lap one, while Hadjar misjudged his braking behind Kimi Antonelli but was dealing with horrendous visibility.
So Racing Bulls can count itself somewhat unfortunate to have lost so much ground to its midfield rivals – not that bad luck means anything when the all-important prize money is dished out at the end of the year. – JS
Winner: Pierre Gasly – 6th
Pierre Gasly crossed the Silverstone finish line with a season-best finish of sixth.
Like many other ‘underdogs’ this weekend, Gasly found himself fighting with the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen, bringing his Alpine home just behind the two world champions.
Gasly said on Saturday that he was “praying for rain all night long” and he certainly took full advantage of his wish being granted – giving his team a much-needed morale boost at a tricky time. – Heidi Munn
Loser: Haas – 11th, 13th
Considering where Hulkenberg finished, from 19th on the grid, this race has to go down as a massive missed opportunity for Haas, which brought an all-new floor to Silverstone that seemed to transform the car around the sort of high-speed track it’s so far struggled at in 2025.
But messy execution let it down on the kind of weekend where many of the usual frontrunners tripped up and big points were there to be had for opportunistic midfielders.
Bearman’s needless grid penalty meant he started well out of position, the gamble to pit for slicks after the formation lap was a mistake, and he finished a scruffy race by colliding with his team-mate.
Esteban Ocon described the car as “very difficult to drive throughout the race” and although he ran inside the top five at one stage, it was a false picture created by the mistaken decision to not stop for fresh intermediates before the heavy rain came.
This is normally the sort of crazy race that leads to a strong Ocon result, so he was “pissed off” that Haas totally failed to capitalise on this occasion. – Ben Anderson
Winner: Lewis Hamilton – 4th
OK, his 12-race podium streak at Silverstone is over. OK, the in-race feedback was familiarly subdued. OK, he was beaten to the podium by a Sauber. And OK, he cut largely the same frustrated figure of previous rounds in his post-race media debrief.
But this was undoubtedly at the upper end of Hamilton’s performances in Ferrari red.
He was convincingly better than team-mate Charles Leclerc in what he described as “not a car that likes those conditions”, and if we’re really going to pick at the Sauber thread it was largely circumstantial that Hulkenberg got ahead in the first pitstop phase – there’s little for Hamilton to be marked down on in that regard.
Throw in a much stronger Saturday, too, and there are definitely signs of encouragement for Hamilton to walk away with. – JC
Loser: Mercedes – 10th, DNF
This is a race Mercedes would like to forget, with a DNF for rookie Kimi Antonelli and a 10th-place finish for George Russell.
With a difficult race comes difficult strategy. Team principal Toto Wolff said “there certainly wasn’t anything to look good, that was all bad”, as he believes the decisions the pitwall made were total misjudgments.
The early call to pit for hard tyres was one labelled by Wolff as “catastrophic”, as it left Mercedes’ cars in the middle of the pack, then struggling behind the safety car.
Antonelli was left with no option but to retire after his diffuser was badly damaged when Hadjar crashed into the back of him (his vision having been obstructed by the spray from the Mercedes).
As for Russell, tyre strategy and an unfortunate spin left him in the middle of the pack, fighting to gain positions while battling his tyres. – HM
Loser: Charles Leclerc – 14th
This was probably Charles Leclerc’s worst performance of the season so far. After berating himself for qualifying only sixth in a car that looked a contender for pole after Q2, Leclerc made the same mistaken gamble as Russell by pitting at the end of the formation lap to fit slicks for the drying track.
And Leclerc’s race never recovered. He just about reached the bottom of the top 10 at one stage, while his team-mate was chasing down a podium finish that didn’t quite materialise, but mostly spent this race struggling to fire up the wrong tyres at the wrong time, flying off the road at high speed, and complaining of water splashing onto his visor and blinding him.
To finish 14th out of 15 classified finishers when a Sauber is on the podium and almost 50 seconds up the road was a miserable outcome. – BA
