PlanetF1.com 2025 Awards: Biggest Disappointment of the Season
Credit: Antoine Truchet
Lando Norris won the title, McLaren the championship double. Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari never got off the ground, and Alpine got the wooden spoon, plus three of the bottom four drivers.
Who really failed us in F1 2025? Our writers name the biggest disappointment of the season…
Lewis Hamilton’s pile of paperwork
By Michelle Foster
Firstly, props where props are due.
Ferrari taught us a very important lesson this season: comparison.
The Italian media crowed ahead of the F1 2025 that Ferrari had found anything between 0.25 and half a second with the SF-25. Fantastic.
Until you ask, compared to what? Turned out it was my lawn mower.
Even Lewis Hamilton – although, to be fair, Ferrari never said this – was expected to be a step up from Carlos Sainz.
Oh how we laughed and laughed and (crying harder) laughed.
Lewis Hamilton vs Charles Leclerc: Ferrari 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
Having lost the title to McLaren by 14 points in 2024, the SF-25 did not keep pace with the McLaren F1 car never mind surpass it by 0.25s.
It didn’t fight for the championship or even a race win. It struggled to finish on the podium. Bagged all of one pole position.
After 24 miserable races, Ferrari had slumped to P4 in the Constructors’ Championship.
But no, that’s not the biggest disappointment, it’s one of the drivers: Lewis Hamilton.
The Briton joined Ferrari amidst huge fanfare – black suits and trenchcoasts, photos outside of Enzo’s house, standing next to iconic Ferrari cars, and let’s not forget the mega, mega dollar deals (said to be over $400m when all the deals were done).
And yet here we are at the end of a 24-race championship with one Sprint victory, not a single grand prix podium – never mind win – in sight… and a whole lot of documents on the table about changes that need to be made.
I reckon by now that pile of documents may be high enough to cover the trophy cabinet.
But don’t for a moment think the Tifosi isn’t aware that there’s nothing behind that pile of paperwork except endless promises and broken dreams.
Instead of visiting Maranello and seeing a flag flying out front to celebrate a grand prix, perhaps the Italian stable can set up a stack of those Hamilton documents for the Tifosi to gaze on in wonder. Or not.
Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari is my biggest disappointment of F1 2025, perhaps longer.
Understandable struggles don’t make them acceptable
By Mat Coch
It’s easy to look at Lewis Hamilton or Ferrari as a whole and say it failed to deliver, but at least it was in the conversation at points.
Such is the competitive beast that F1 has become that small changes in fortune can have seismic ramifications on track.
Add into the mix the strategy play in terms of resource allocation for 2026 and I’m not one to get too hung up on season-specific performances in 2025.
With that said, there is a great degree of soul-searching to be done at Alpine. It’s a team that’s capable of so much more than last in the Constructors’ Championship.
It is the Renault factory team, let us not forget, one of the largest car companies on the planet. Pierre Gasly is a handy driver and Franco Colapinto, for all his detractors, has proven to be a capable racer, too.
Emphasising my point is that Alpine’s performance in 2025 was largely a follow on from 2024, when it was lucky not to finish eighth in the teams’ title – one fortunate result in Brazil proved a massive saving grace.
Nobody expected miracles of Flavio Briatore, it’s never going to be a case of flicking a switch and transforming the squad into a title contender overnight, but the minimum expectation was to hold station.
The reasons for that slip a varied and understandable, but that’s not the same thing as being acceptable.
Not from a team that represents one of the largest car companies on the planet.
Ferrari has to accept backwards step before looking ahead
By Henry Valantine
Yes, Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari has not lived up to his (and most others’) expectations, but I’m going to choose the Scuderia as a whole here.
Changing significant parts of the car’s concept heading into the final season of a regulation cycle felt potentially misguided before the year began, which was proven correct as the year went on.
It may even be fair to say the pressure on Hamilton to win from the get-go in the brand new – and unique – environment Ferrari presents was probably too much to expect, with the combined weight of both driver and team being the biggest Formula 1 has ever seen.
And yet, the continued expectations of victory also feel unnecessary.
Watch our drifting finale with V14
Yes, Ferrari is Ferrari, the biggest and most historically successful brand in Formula 1, but it is also one where the time between its last Drivers’ title, if it were a person, would have been born, grown up and would now be able to buy alcohol legally in Italy.
With that, then, John Elkann’s comments towards the end of the season telling the drivers to “talk less” were at best an attempt at in-team motivation, but at worst came across as coming down from on high with public criticism, along with no recent history of success upon which to fall back.
It feels like there has to be a mentality shift heading into the clean slate of 2026 of accepting the position Ferrari has been in, look to start on solid foundations, and choose clear paths to follow to develop.
The team has a strong, forthright personality at the helm in Fred Vasseur, one embedded, excellent driver in Charles Leclerc and the most successful driver the sport has ever seen alongside him in Hamilton, looking to get back towards his best form next year.
The ingredients are there, but can the team put them together?
Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferrari
By Oliver Harden
It has to be Ferrari.
How can it not be, having fallen just two points short of McLaren in 2024 only to finish 435 adrift 12 months later?
It remains utterly perplexing that the team, on the back of its most productive season in years, decided to change its car concept so dramatically for the final year of the ground-effect regulations.
The potential reward – producing a car miles ahead of the rest – did not outweigh the risk in an era in which even the tiniest changes can bring severe unintended consequences.
Ferrari was reminded of this lesson during the 2024 season, when a botched mid-season upgrade reawakened the porpoising phenomenon and resulted in a lost run of races that effectively cost the team the constructors’ title, but still it pressed ahead with the sweeping changes for 2025 anyway.
The result – and the great irony – of all this was that Lewis Hamilton found at Ferrari exactly the same problem he had at Mercedes: a badly born, fundamentally flawed car with its big weakness baked in for the season.
And with names of the stature of Ferrari and Hamilton involved, the blowback – both externally and internally – from the team’s great gamble of 2025 has been significant.
That decision to overhaul a winning 2024 car is easily the biggest error a team has made technically since McLaren did the same in 2012/13.
How did that go, you ask? Nine years without a win.
Moral of the story: never change a winning team.
Liam Lawson: The frontrunner that never was
By Thomas Maher
I had huge hopes for Liam Lawson over the winter last year having heard such positive noises from within the Red Bull camp.
The Kiwi driver appeared to have everything needed to thrive alongside Max Verstappen: grit, temerity, aggression, and self-confidence in abundance.
Surely he would thrive in a no-nonsense environment that seemed to tally so well with his personality?
I fully expected him to emerge as a new and exciting front-runner, a driver set to become a big name in F1 as a regular podium finisher and, perhaps, even a race winner.
But that all quickly disappeared.
Maybe, with time, Lawson could have figured out the RB21 but, as the considerably more experienced Yuki Tsunoda showed, that task wasn’t easy for anyone.
By the second weekend, the management in place at the time had realised that the experience of being utterly dominated by Verstappen, toiling around towards the back in an apparently decent car, could be hugely damaging for such a young driver.
Whether Lawson did or didn’t agree with the call made to take him out of that situation and place him back at Racing Bulls, it likely saved his career.
It returned him to a lower baseline of expectation and, as a result, he’s still here to fight another day, having shown by year end that he could match the highly-rated Isack Hadjar.
It’s worth remembering that, while Lawson appears to be around considerably longer than the true ‘rookies’ of 2025, he had competed in just half a season’s worth of races before his Red Bull call-up, displaced over two seasons.
With Tsunoda flopping completely, possibly ending his career in F1 entirely, Lawson may not have had the circumstances needed to emerge as a frontrunner in quite the way I expected pre-season, but, in time, he may come to view that demotion as a blessing in disguise.
Too much, too soon, for the young upstart of Red Bull, but I have high hopes he can deliver upon his potential in time.
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