This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 8, 2025 – September 14, 2025
Am I on fire?” asked Lando Norris as his F1 world championship hopes went up in smoke at the Dutch Grand Prix last weekend. The unspoken answer is that the McLaren driver needs to be absolutely blazing if he is to have any hope of catching his teammate, Oscar Piastri, who scorched into a 34-point lead with nine races to go.
Since there were no flames, Norris was able to climb out of his smouldering cockpit to safety — one of many hot takes from the sport’s dramatic return after its mid-summer break. Where it left off in Hungary, it picked up in Zandvoort: incident-packed with three safety cars and multiple crashes — more than enough to keep its ever-growing global audience enthralled.
If the drivers’ contest now has a firm favourite — the constructors’ title is already headed to McLaren — there is still a lot to play for on what golfers would call “the back nine”, or what is left of the 24-race championship. And that Norris, who had been beaten to pole by just 0.012 seconds and had been tailgating Piastri for much of the race, found that his US$16 million space-age-engineered car had an oil leak tells him that anything can still happen.
Track carnage and broken dreams notwithstanding, the sport is in rude health. August’s extended pitstop was the first time the sport had paused for breath since its glitzy launch back in February. As it is the 75th anniversary of the inaugural season, owners Liberty Media pulled out all the stops in honouring those doughty pioneers.
The 1950 season consisted of six races in Europe, plus the Indianapolis 500 in the US, and was won by an Alfa Romeo team that included the immortal Juan Manuel Fangio. With four times as many races on five continents, today’s F1 is unrecognisable, but 2025 has proved a worthy successor.
After a unique F1 75 Live event at London’s O2 Arena, attended by all 10 teams, proved the perfect appetiser, the sport has not looked in its rearview mirror since. Alongside the Grands Prix are six sprint races, while the F1 movie was launched in New York’s Times Square and London’s Leicester Square. It is already the largest-grossing sports film of all time. The real thing gets plenty of eyeballs, too, with a live audience of 3.9 million — the biggest combined attendance ever to watch the first 14 races.
The YouTube livestream was viewed in 211 countries and territories worldwide, making it the most successful livestream in the channel’s history. As for F1’s social media channels,7.5 million tuned in to the live broadcast. It is all a very long way from the early doubts of Liberty’s tenure and struggles of the Covid years.
And it is many light years from Bernie Ecclestone’s “I wouldn’t pay to watch it” low point of 2016. But we had reckoned without the impact of the Netflix Drive to Survive series, which many thought referred to the sport itself and not the drivers!
Since 2020, F1 has more than doubled its partnerships, going from 12 to 27. The first half of this year alone has seen it expand its portfolio by securing deals with companies as prestigious as Disney, PepsiCo, LEGO, Louis Vuitton, TAG Heuer and Moët Hennessy.
Looking to the future, several long-term contracts have been renewed, with much of the calendar now signed up into the 2030s, and Miami and Austria into the 2040s. F1 now claims a global audience of 827 million.
Underpinning all this is impressive growth in the huge markets of the US and China, where audiences are up 11% and 39% respectively in 2024. In China, 46% of viewers are female, with 40% aged between 16 and 34. Such diversity was undreamed of in the old Eurocentric days when most petrol heads were thought to be male, pale and stale.
The sport is also bucking the trend on the track, having so far steered clear of the customary pitfalls of intra-team rivalry. McLaren’s superiority was so overwhelming that the constructors’ title was sewn up in the spring, but that procession had been turned into a cliffhanger between its two drivers.
Reigning drivers’ champion Max Verstappen, of Red Bull, could no longer hold off the twin challenge of Australia’s Piastri and Britain’s Norris. And remarkably for an in-house head-to-head, the two men got along. They are not mates, but their relationship is solid and respectful, and unlikely to sink to the depths of certain infamous intra-team jousts of the past.
The most celebrated spat was between McLaren’s Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, who on several occasions tried to knock each other off the track during a race. At Williams, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet loathed each other, while at Mercedes, the lack of trust between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg was such that their mechanics had to be switched from one side of the garage to the other.
The harmony between McLaren’s current duo might have been tested when Norris shunted into the back of his teammate at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal. But it was a glaring error of judgement for which he immediately apologised — and was accepted. As it happened, he harmed his own chances rather than Piastri’s, having to retire from the race while the Aussie took fourth place and extended his lead.
At the mid-season break, a mere nine points separated the pair, but now there are 34, which prompted Norris to say: “The only thing I can do is to try to win every race. That’s going to be difficult, but I’ll give it everything I can. Today was unlucky. It’s not my fault. It’s just racing.”
Piastri, who now has the wind in his sails, said: “Obviously, it was incredibly unfortunate for Lando at the end. But it felt like I was in control of that [race] and used the pace that I needed to.”
But the top two are not the only story in town. F1 being F1, there’s no shortage of human drama down the field. However, this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza will not be the glorious occasion that Ferrari dreamed of. Having signed up seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton last year, this moment has been a long time coming.
The season began full of hope, with Hamilton re-energised about driving for his favourite marque. But both Ferraris were disqualified from the Shanghai Grand Prix for technical infringements, having been nowhere near the McLarens. They still aren’t, and a season of promise has become one of frustration for a driver who seems destined not to clinch a historic eighth world title.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff insisted Hamilton, who turned 40 this year, still had it in him, but the driver disagreed, saying he was “just useless” and “drove terribly” at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Adding to his angst, the Briton has been out-qualified by his teammate Charles Leclerc 12-5 across all qualifying sessions, where a fair comparison can be made, and is on average 0.146 seconds slower.
Even if he does get the right car, it might not be enough, as Leclerc will have it, too. Let’s hope the tifosi can lift his spirits if not his finishing position at Monza. Meanwhile, the global audience will be focusing on the battle up front, where teammates go toe-to-toe. But only one of them is likely to go down in flames.
Bob Holmes is a long-time sportswriter specialising in football
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