PlanetF1.com 2025 Awards: Driver of the Year
Our writers have had their say on the 2025 driver of the season.
The F1 2025 championship has been decided with a first world championship for Lando Norris and a wooden spoon for the six-race Jack Doohan. But that by no means tells the full story.
Norris won the title, but was he the best driver over the season?
Lando Norris wasn’t even in the season’s top three
By Michelle Foster
Lando Norris won the F1 2025 world title. The standings say so. 423 points to Max Verstappen’s 421 and Oscar Piastri’s 410.
But was he the driver of the season? No. That was Max Verstappen.
When Verstappen said he would’ve already wrapped up the title if he had been driving the McLaren, it wasn’t a joke, a dig or a mind game. It was fact.
Verstappen is the best driver on the grid and he proved it by taking eight grands prix wins to Norris’s seven.
Even though the McLaren MCL39 was the best car on the grid for most of the season, Verstappen still eked out wins, pushing his RB21 beyond its limits – at least in Yuki Tsunoda’s hands – to claim six wins in the last nine races.
Max Verstappen vs Yuki Tsunoda: Red Bull head-to-head scores for F1 2025
👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates
👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates
Yes, Red Bull found something with its floor in the second part of the season but Verstappen was the only one of the two drivers who was able to exploit it.
Overhauling 104-point deficit to finish P2 in the standings, Verstappen once again proved he is a generational talent.
One-man team, blah-blah-car-designed-for-me, whatever, put Max in that MCL39 even with a strong teammate and the title would not have gone down to the line in a three-horse fight.
Ranked two for me was Oscar Piastri, who was given a bit of a raw deal in McLaren’s papaya rules, while George Russell comes third ahead of Charles Leclerc.
Norris, yes he won the title, but he was only P5 in the driving stakes.
Max Verstappen vs. Lando Norris for 2025’s ‘best driver’
By Thomas Maher
I’ve always maintained that the best drivers are those who can rise to the occasion when the pressure ramps up.
In that regard, I believe Norris showed a clean pair of heels to Oscar Piastri at McLaren.
While the Australian was stellar for the first half of the year, he went through a shaky period when the repercussions became very real, and only managed to get his head back in the game too late to get things back on track.
But, for Norris, he dug deep when things started to get tough.
Realising the need to work harder and address his weaknesses, he’s shared details of how he worked with a psychologist and surrounded himself with people to help him extract more performance from himself in areas of weakness.
Without doubt, he’s learned from his stumbles in 2024 and delivered exactly what he needed to do this season to wrap up that title.
It’s a Nico Rosberg-esque title, in my book.
While there has been a driver, Max Verstappen, with a higher performance ceiling on the grid with him, which neither he nor his employers would seem to dispute, Norris overcame that small difference through diligence, hard work and capitalising on the performance of the McLaren on days when Piastri couldn’t even get close.
Watch our drifting finale with V14
Verstappen’s performance remained exemplary throughout the season and, with the Dutch driver’s talents seemingly stronger than ever, he remains the benchmark in Formula 1.
As I wrote in my post-race Winners and Losers column, I maintain that Verstappen may have lost, but he has not been defeated.
This is where the few small question marks still linger over Norris.
He’s knocking on the door of being able to be considered elite, but there’s not yet quite enough from him to show that he has shaken off his viewing of Verstappen as a bogeyman, a psychological hurdle that will be interesting to watch with the two across a season of relatively equal performance, rather than the season of two halves that 2025 largely was.
The question of the ‘best’ driver in a season is always an interesting one for me.
If viewed on pure talent and delivering upon that with the equipment available, then it’s Verstappen.
If it’s based on doing what’s necessary, rising to a challenge and an opportunity, and keeping your head, then it’s Norris.
Verstappen matched Alonso’s 2012 heroics
By Henry Valantine
Yes, Lando Norris is world champion. And especially after 24 races, titles are not won by accident.
However, it is impossible to ignore Max Verstappen over anyone else for being the best driver of the season.
Not since Fernando Alonso in 2012 has a car so clearly undercooked compared to the class of the field managed to run the title winner so close, though the difference this time was that once Red Bull cleared up its gremlins in the RB21, Verstappen was able to soar once again.
Yes, he likes a car to handle in a particular way that seems to have caught out so many of his teammates, but the fact in itself he can handle it shows the skill involved here.
Now that moment of rage overflowing in Barcelona is the biggest mark against him this year, and he would have argued at the time for it being inconsequential to the overall championship standings given he was nowhere near the pace at that point.
If this year teaches Verstappen anything, it’s that his so-called ‘Mad Max’ persona will likely die out as a result.
This isn’t in any way to denigrate what Norris has achieved, by the way – he showed clear mettle at key moments when perhaps he would not have done in years gone by.
Likewise, a hat tip has to go to both George Russell for his excellent season at Mercedes and Oscar Piastri for challenging for a title in only his third season.
Remember, it took Verstappen and Norris until their seventh seasons to win a title, Jenson Button his 10th, Alonso and Vettel their fourth, with Lewis Hamilton being the exception in his second season.
There’s still time for the Australian yet.
However, in my mind, there is no looking beyond Verstappen here.
Max Verstappen remains head and shoulders above the rest
By Oliver Harden
Around this time last year, in the afterglow of Max Verstappen’s fourth consecutive world championship, I wrote that he is the closest thing to unbeatable F1 has ever seen.
That he came so close to winning a fifth title in 2025, even with everything (a dominant McLaren, a weak Red Bull) counting against him, has only enhanced that view.
Reflect on this season and two moments in particular will remain forever lodged the memory, both of which – inevitably in F1 these days – have Verstappen at the heart of them.
The first is his inch-perfect weekend at Suzuka, where McLaren was humbled for the first time in 2025.
The second is his pass on Oscar Piastri at the first corner at Imola, a moment to remind us why we watch sport at all: to witness the extraordinary.
It takes a lot for me to shout at the TV these days, but watching that move on Piastri unfold -watching it develop frame by frame from idea to opportunity to overtake – had me positively roaring.
And that’s without mentioning his recovery to third from a pit-lane start in Brazil.
And his decision to take a low-downforce rear wing for qualifying at Silverstone, relying on his touch and feel to keep him on the straight and narrow through all those quick corners.
And the way he spooked Lando Norris off the circuit at the start in Las Vegas.
The title may have gone elsewhere, the count may have been paused at four, but Verstappen remains head and shoulders above the rest.
Let’s just hope that Red Bull remains competitive enough for Max to keep delivering these breathtaking moments – the ones nobody else is capable of – in 2026.
F1 would be a poorer place without him at the front next season.
The world championship isn’t necessarily a measure of greatness
By Mat Coch
The typical measure of ‘best’ in motorsport is the driver who wins, so by that logic one must suggest it’s Lando Norris.
The McLaren driver had a superb season, winning seven times and driving home the point that he’s one of the very best drivers on the grid; the world championship is evidence of that.
But I don’t feel he was the best driver on the grid. There were too many instances where he wasn’t as good as Oscar Piastri in the same machinery, and as such naming him the best driver of the year just doesn’t sit right.
There were also instances when he didn’t win races that perhaps he should have, events where he was out-performed by a driver in a lesser car. There were times Max Verstappen was better.
That the Dutchman battled his way back into title contention even when he himself felt it was beyond reach. He led a team into the depths of a championship fight he by rights had no part in.
Verstappen may not have won the world championship, but he did win more races than any other driver in F1 2025. It’s a hell of an accomplishment.
And when we think back on the individual drives of the season, its his performances that spring to mind; not Norris, and not Piastri.
His drive from the pit lane in Brazil was extraordinary, so too in Japan when he withstood lap after lap of pressure from both McLarens.
The world championship is the measure of ultimate achievement in any given year; it’s not necessarily a measure of greatness. However, in my opinion, in F1 2025, it was two points off doing both.
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