Lando Norris sealed his first Formula 1 drivers’ title with a third-place finish in the 2025 season finale in Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old has become champion in his seventh season on the grid, and is the first McLaren driver to win the title since Lewis Hamilton in 2008.<\/p>\n
Red Bull driver Max Verstappen took a dominant win out front, his eighth of the season (which is most in the field), but never attempted any particular tactics to complicate Norris’s life, while the other title-contending McLaren of Oscar Piastri slotted in between them on the podium.<\/p>\n
The three title contenders all stayed out of trouble on the opening lap, as Verstappen darted to the left off the line to cover off Norris – before Piastri pounced on his team-mate around the outside of Turn 9 despite the harder tyre, with Norris fairly happy to yield the position rather than risk contact.<\/p>\n
They spread out, all a couple of seconds apart or so, from there on, with Norris instead coming under surprise pressure from Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc – taking the role of title interloper after the contenders’ closest rival George Russell struggled off the line.<\/p>\n
Leclerc was regularly in Norris’ DRS though never particularly close to making a move, and they stayed in the same positions when they both pitted on lap 17 of 58 – successfully responding to a potential undercut from Russell’s Mercedes.<\/p>\n
The pitstops released Norris and Leclerc behind a gaggle of cars battling on older tyres, but navigating through them proved fairly unproblematic for the championship leader.<\/p>\n
He lunged Kimi Antonelli at Turn 5, eased past Carlos Sainz on the run to Turn 9, then took care of both Lance Stroll and Liam Lawson the next time by on the straight to Turn 7 – the two-in-one move made easier by no defence from Lawson, clearly preferring to have DRS from Norris on the following straight.<\/p>\n
It set up the first nervy moment as Lawson counter-attacked Norris into Turn 9, though ultimately stayed behind. The second, much nervier, came as Norris came up Tsunoda – clearly instructed to hold him up – and went all four wheels off-track in overtaking him on the run to Turn 7.<\/p>\n
However, this was preceded by Tsunoda lurching side to side in what would ultimately deemed to be an excessive manner – as he was slapped with a five-second penalty for too many changes of direction in defence, and Norris was let off for his potential transgression.<\/p>\n
With his third place now relatively out of jeopardy, the battle for victory no longer had real bearing on the title – and it wasn’t exactly a battle anyway.<\/p>\n
Both Verstappen and Piastri one-stopped, the latter extending his initial stint on the hards to 41 laps – by the end of which he was overtaken by Verstappen coming back through on fresher tyres.<\/p>\n
Piastri was then well over 20 seconds back once he swapped to fresh mediums, and made no real impression on that gap.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He ultimately finished 12.6s back, with Norris a further four seconds behind but crucially still two points ahead of Verstappen in the final standings.<\/p>\n
Leclerc’s bid to challenge Norris for the podium didn’t hold up in the second nor third stint, so he capped off a disappointing Ferrari season with a lonely fifth – hugely clear of Russell, who seemingly had no performance at all in the Mercedes.<\/p>\n
Fernando Alonso drove a defensive race in the Aston Martin for a sixth-place finish – but his sixth place was not quite enough for Aston Martin to overhaul Racing Bulls for sixth in the constructors’, despite a deeply uncompetitive showing for the latter. A late penalty for more than one change of direction in defence dropped the other Aston Martin of Stroll from ninth to 11th<\/p>\n
Esteban Ocon fought off a late charge from the Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton on fresher, softer tyres for seventh. <\/p>\n
End of race time penalties for Stroll and Ollie Bearman for excessive changes of direction in defence shuffled the final points scorers and elevated Nico Hulkenberg to ninth in Sauber’s final race before becoming Audi.<\/p>\n
Stroll dropped out of the points with his own penalty and was then elevated back to 10th again minutes later when Bearman’s was applied.<\/p>\n
Results<\/p>\n
1 Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
2 Oscar Piastri (McLaren) +12.594s
3 Lando Norris (McLaren) +16.572s
4 Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) +23.279s
5 George Russell (Mercedes) +48.563s
6 Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin) +1m07.562s
7 Esteban Ocon (Haas) +1m09.876s
8 Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari) +1m12.670s
9 Nico Hulkenberg (Sauber) +1m19.014s
10 Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) +1m19.523s
11 Gabriel Bortoleto (Sauber) +1m21.043s
12 Ollie Bearman (Haas) +1m21.166s
13 Carlos Sainz (Williams) +1m22.158s
14 Yuki Tsunoda (Red Bull) +1m23.794s
15 Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes) +1m24.399s
16 Alex Albon (Williams) +1m30.327s
17 Isack Hadjar (Racing Bulls) +1 lap
18 Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls) +1 lap
19 Pierre Gasly (Alpine) +1 lap
20 Franco Colapinto (Alpine) +1 lap<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lando Norris sealed his first Formula 1 drivers’ title with a third-place finish in the 2025 season finale…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-333062","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}