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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today we’re still looking back on the 2025 Formula One season just gone, but with a different, more debatable twist.

I’m Alex, and Patrick Iversen, Madeline Coleman and Luke Smith will (sort of) be along later.

But before we go any further, I just wanted to say a quick thank you for subscribing to Prime Tire in 2025. I hope you get plenty of rest and merriment during this festive period, and we’ll soon be heading into 2026 with plenty more sizzling F1 stories to fill your inboxes. (One more edition to come next week, though, with Patrick at the helm.)

Cheers!

Rank ‘EmHave your say about 2025’s best F1 drivers

This time of year can mean seeing people you haven’t for a while. So, once the catch-up chat has settled down and, perhaps, to assuage any arguments with difficult relatives, why not reach for what is surely F1’s best debate, keeping the conversation flowing away from difficult topics?

After all, no one has ever fallen out over selecting the best driver of a season or era, or even choosing the all-time great. Nope. Not a single disagreement.

OK, now that we’ve dealt with the sarcasm, here’s what we’re going to do in this festive PT: First, each of myself, Madeline, Luke and Pat are going to present our picks for the top 10 drivers of 2025 — a year when the title contenders thrilled and spilled, this era’s top driver ended up with a defeat for the ages and his predecessor had a shocking first season with Ferrari.

Here goes:

Madeline’s top 10

Max Verstappen
George Russell
Charles Leclerc
Lando Norris
Oscar Piastri
Carlos Sainz
Isack Hadjar
Alex Albon/Fernando Alonso (Editor’s note: Wait, is this a top 11?!)
Ollie Bearman
Pierre Gasly

Toughest call: “One of the harder calls to make was which rookie — if any — made it into our top 10 and in what order. What bumped Hadjar ahead of the rest for me was that Zandvoort podium, combined with his qualifying consistency in a midfield car. He advanced to Q3 15 times this season — impressive.”

Luke’s top 10

Verstappen
Russell
Leclerc
Norris
Piastri
Alonso
Sainz
Hadjar
Albon
Kimi Antonelli

Alex’s top 10:

Verstappen
Leclerc
Russell
Norris
Piastri
Alonso
Sainz
Gasly
Hadjar
Nico Hülkenberg

Toughest call: “Norris ahead of Piastri in fourth/fifth. They were so close all year, but Norris was there or thereabouts (and often faster before messing up in qualifying) when Piastri was doing all his winning. But during the Monza-Vegas run of races, Piastri’s pace gap to the other McLaren was surprisingly big, and that ultimately cost him the title. And the others ahead in the rankings were just better, overall, despite driving worse cars.”

Pat’s top 10:

Verstappen
Russell
Leclerc
Piastri
Norris
Sainz
Bearman
Hadjar
Antonelli
Alonso

Head here to see the final top 10 that Luke and Madeline selected together to form The Athletic’s official driver rankings of the 2025 season.

Now, here’s your chance to vote on the best performers of the season, which we’ll publish in a future PT edition coming your way early in the new year. You can go all the way down to last place and give every driver a rating from 1-10.

It’s worth remembering here that F1, perhaps more than any other sport, is usually decided by the equipment on offer to each competitor. So, where drivers ultimately finish in the championship standings doesn’t truly reflect their performances as individuals.

You can toil in a bad car (see Gasly’s 2025, or Alonso famously in 2012) and even with fine work not be rewarded with the most attention-grabbing results. That’s what rankings such as these usually try to correct, taking into account the context of a full season.

Anyway, hopefully that was a bit of fun and everyone is still firm friends!

Lovely stuff. Now, speaking of which …

Kym Illman / Getty Images

Meet MekiesHow Red Bull’s team boss got his F1 break

Luke filed one final feature to end the year this week: a profile of Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies.

Mekies took over after Christian Horner’s surprise axing following this year’s British GP and quickly earned the respect of not just critical pieces of the Red Bull squad (aka Verstappen’s camp), but also many outside F1 observers.

His words were just blissfully straightforward compared to the constant, cynical mind games of his predecessor.

The 48-year-old Mekies has a long history in F1, starting out with the Arrows team in 2001, where he worked with a certain Jos Verstappen. Check out Luke’s piece to discover where Mekies went next along his route to one of F1’s top jobs, and to spot how many times he charmingly calls himself a “fan” of the championship.

It’s a feel-good story to end the year — on someone once described as “a rare example of an engineer with a heart.”

Outside the points

It’s Christmas, so, of course, there is an F1 technical rules controversy brewing over the new engines coming in 2026.

Get ready for much more of that next year, as the start of any new rules cycle means teams can quickly find big gains buried in the wording of the new regulations, which can often leave their rivals scrambling.

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