Alpine ended the F1 2025 season with three of its drivers – Pierre Gasly, Franco Colapinto and Jack Doohan – in the bottom four and Yuki Tsunoda ended up without a seat for F1 2026.
But who was the worst driver of the season? After picking the best driver of F1 2025, our writers turn attention to the worst…
Clear winner: Yuki Tsunoda!
By Michelle Foster
This is actually a difficult one to evaluate as it is very car-dependent, more so than the best driver.
Yes, the Alpine A525 was an awful car, handling, speed and drivability all lacking.
But that doesn’t mean the drivers were the worst? No. In fact, Pierre Gasly deserves a top-10 finish for the season.
But Yuki Tsunoda – Red Bull driver Yuki Tsunoda – now there’s a different story. And a not-so-difficult choice.
Max Verstappen vs Yuki Tsunoda: Red Bull Racing 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
His list of transgressions as noted by the stewards, and this isn’t including track limits, exceeded the rest of the field – even Liam Lawson, who Tsunoda was often complaining about.
But given Tsunoda was in the Red Bull and Lawson the Racing Bulls, they should never have been on the same piece of tarmac for the Japanese driver to bang wheels with.
As much as Tsunoda is a character, a personality, he isn’t up to the job.
I wish Tsunoda all the best for the future, but five years into Formula 1 and scoring just 30 points in Red Bull colours is a sure sign that this is not for you.
お幸せに
With others waiting in the wings, Franco Colapinto has to improve
By Mat Coch
I’m going to preface my opinion by stating categorically that every driver who reaches Formula 1 level is phenomenally talented. The days of simply buying one’s way onto the grid are gone.
Perhaps an element of that remains, but you still need to be good enough to put yourself in that shop window, and the vast majority of youngsters simply don’t reach that marker.
And so by identifying Franco Colapinto as the ‘worst’ driver of the season, that is absolutely not the same as saying he’s a bad driver. He is extremely talented, but he didn’t have a good season.
One might hypothesise that his performances were a result of desperation, itself a by-product of uncertainty and turmoil within Alpine.
Drafted in after six races, Colapinto never rose to the level he demonstrated at Williams in the latter stages of F1 2024. His stock has fallen as a result, and one can fairly question whether he was even a step up in performance terms from Jack Doohan.
Of course there were other considerations at play, Colapinto brings with him some healthy investment where Doohan did not, but that needs to be translated into points.
But Colapinto didn’t manage that at any point during the course of F1 2025; he and Doohan were the only two drivers with that unfortunate record.
While one might look at the disparity between Yuki Tsunoda and Max Verstappen as a failure by the Japanese driver, the points delta from Colapinto to Gasly was immeasurably more significant.
Red Bull is a team built around Verstappen; Sergio Perez, Liam Lawson, and more latterly Tsunoda all struggled to live with the Dutchman because there’s simply something extraordinary there.
And good as Gasly is, he’s not a generational talent; he doesn’t pose a great a challenge for a prospective teammate. And so, to comprehensively out-pace Colapinto (and Doohan) points to a failing in the second car.
Alpine heads into the F1 2026 campaign with a settled line up but, should things continue as they did this season, it’s difficult to continue justifying Colapinto’s position. Especially with Paul Aron waiting in the wings.
One dishonourable mention as Yuki Tsunoda chosen again
By Henry Valantine
I hate to say it, but Yuki Tsunoda takes my vote as well.
A pre-season would probably have helped him immensely had he been chosen first time around.
And although he improved significantly in the final rounds, that doesn’t stop him from lifting himself off the bottom.
Around other teams, for the fact he didn’t get a point this year, Franco Colapinto can take encouragement from how he drove at times against Pierre Gasly, matching up relatively well, being 11-7 down in the race head-to-head and losing 13-5 in qualifying, but the lack of competitiveness in the car speaks louder than his performances probably.
There is a somewhat dishonourable mention, which might feel harsh: Esteban Ocon.
He was the only senior driver to have been outscored by a rookie teammate this year.
He lost the qualifying head-to-head (though edged the race head-to-head) at Haas and explained how braking issues had been hindering his progress in the latter part of the year, with his brakes not giving him the feedback he wants.
Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu said that Ocon and Oliver Bearman have different driving styles on an identical setup, and while the team tried different brake materials to help the French driver, he prefers a car “behaving in a certain way” to get the most out of it, and is “amazing” when he finds that window – but he did not find it as much as he would have liked in the second half of the year.
That will be a battle to watch unfold over the course of next season, but in the here and now, it’s still hard to see past Tsunoda for not living up to expectations at Red Bull.
I genuinely wish him nothing but the best as there’s a very strong driver in there.
Hopefully he can do as Gasly and Alex Albon have managed and secure a seat elsewhere for 2027 to potentially give him a better platform to perform.
Hard to look past Jack Doohan
By Oliver Harden
Yes, Yuki Tsunoda wasn’t good.
But his struggles in Red Bull’s second seat were entirely predictable – hence the team’s great reluctance to give him a chance before this season – so he deserves more sympathy than criticism.
Even with a sample size of six races, it’s hard to look beyond Jack Doohan – currently crashing left, right and centre in Super Formula testing – as the worst driver of the season.
The abiding image of Doohan’s short stint at Alpine is the sight of him spinning into the barriers at high speed in FP2 at Suzuka having made the error of leaving his DRS open as he tipped the car into Turn 1.
That incident, easily the most basic misjudgement by a driver all season, came to encapsulate his shortened stint as a full-time F1 driver.
It wasn’t so much his performance level – never hugely behind Pierre Gasly on pace, never really bettered by Franco Colapinto – but how overawed he seemed to be by the whole experience.
For someone who literally grew up in the business of motor racing, and had been on the verge of an F1 seat for some years, it was surprising how… wide-eyed he appeared during his spell with Alpine.
True, it did not help that he spent his entire tenure in a race seat with the spectre of Colapinto hanging over him, yet Alpine was merely in the process of correcting a mistake with that saga.
Once it became obvious that swap would happen at some stage – as early as mid-January – the team should have just got it over and done with and given Colapinto the benefit of a full pre-season.
The way it unfolded, Alpine never saw the best of Doohan and, as a result, didn’t get the most out of Colapinto either.
A reminder here that Doohan was announced as a 2025 Alpine driver four days before Colapinto replaced Logan Sargeant at Williams for the second half of 2024.
If Alpine had made its decision a few weeks later, Doohan likely would never even have made it to an F1 race seat.
All roads lead to him.
Yuki Tsunoda utterly failed to gel with his new car and team
By Thomas Maher
As Mat said above, there is no such thing as a bad driver in F1, but, as in every sport, someone has to have been the ‘worst’.
For me, that driver has to be poor old Yuki Tsunoda. The Japanese driver fared very well to start the year with Racing Bulls, but upon earning his dream promotion to Red Bull, utterly crumbled.
In years gone by, this may have meant a mid-season swap-out at Red Bull but, unlike in previous years, Red Bull opted to swap out its team boss instead.
Given the stability of a full season, this confidence-boosting measure appeared to have no tangible effect and, while Tsunoda was at pains to point out how he did close the gap pace-wise to Verstappen, there was little evidence of improvement in terms of consistency or results.
Indeed, so great was the disparity between the two Red Bulls that, while Verstappen fought for the title as Tsunoda finished 17th in a car that won eight grands prix, a new record has been set for the biggest points gap between teammates in a season – Tsunoda scored just 7.84 per cent of Verstappen’s total.
Yes, the Red Bull might be uniquely tricky, and yes, it was a season in which Tsunoda was dropped in it at short notice.
But Tsunoda was in his fifth year in F1 and, despite having eight months or so, never managed to figure out how to adjust to the foibles of the RB21.
His short spell at Racing Bulls suggests he could have had a brilliant season in the easier-to-drive machine, but Tsunoda was well past the point of needing the training wheels.
As a professional driver, he proved completely unable to get to grips with a car in which another driver had almost won another title, unquestionably proving the inherent performance of the machine, to the extent that points were very rare and he proved utterly unable to give much by way of support to Verstappen.
By any metric, and short of some exceptional extenuating circumstances, that’s poor.
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