The first tripleheader of the year has come to an end, and while it hardly ended in style at a rather uneventful Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, the season as a whole is looking much more interesting now than it did at the start of it.
Back then, it looked as if McLaren were going to dominate the campaign, with Lando Norris most likely seeing off a challenge from teammate Oscar Piastri to become world champion.
Now, though, those roles are emphatically reversed.
In Piastri, Verstappen may have met his match
Max Verstappen's approach when going wheel to wheel has always been to not give his opponent an inch and make them choose between giving way or colliding with him.
Lewis Hamilton called the Dutchman's bluff a few times in 2021, and they came together multiple times as a result, with Verstappen often coming off worse, but Norris has always been more reluctant to stand his ground and risk a crash.
“I need to get my elbows out and I need to show him I’m not going to willingly give him any positions, but I also have to be a smart driver," the Brit said at the start of this season.
"I don’t need to take any unnecessary risks. I need to keep focusing on myself."
Piastri had never really gone toe-to-toe with the Red Bull man himself before this season, and so it was unclear whether his approach would be more similar to Hamilton's or Norris', but it's not anymore.
"Once I got on the inside, I was not coming out of Turn 1 in second," he said after his win in Saudi Arabia, a win that was secured when he passed Verstappen at the start and caused the Dutchman to get a five-second penalty.
The Aussie was ahead going into the first corner and didn't blink when Verstappen tried to squeeze him out. As a result, the reigning world champion ended up cutting the corner and being penalised for it, and that ultimately decided the battle for the win between the two.
It did more than just that, though, showing Verstappen that he's up against someone who's willing to take as many risks as him, who's not going to move aside to avoid a collision.
Piastri learning from Webber, while Norris is emulating him
With his win, Piastri became the first Australian since 2010 to lead the world championship. The man who did so back then is Mark Webber, his manager, and the former Red Bull driver seems to be a huge asset for him.
“I think with Mark by his side - he’s helping him a lot,” Verstappen said in his post-race press conference.
“It’s great. People learn from their own careers and that’s, of course, what I have with my dad, and Mark is trying to also advise Oscar in that.”
I'd go as far as saying that Webber is an even more valuable mentor than Verstappen's father. Unlike Jos, the Aussie has experience of driving for a top team, of battling teammates, of battling generational talents, and - most importantly - of fighting for the Formula 1 title. Those experiences make him well-equipped to ensure his protege doesn't make the same mistakes that he did.
The other McLaren driver looks likely to do just that, though. Webber's downfall was a lack of consistency, an inability to deliver in the biggest moments, with a crash at the third-to-last race of the 2010 season costing him the championship lead and the title, and Norris is showing that same inability right now.
After being outclassed by Piastri last time out, he headed to Saudi Arabia knowing that he needed to bounce back, but then crashed in the final qualifying session and all but lost his chance to do so. That was the latest of many mistakes that he's made in high-stakes moments in his Formula 1 career.
Webber was ultimately overshadowed by his teammate (Sebastian Vettel) during his time at the top, and by working to ensure that Piastri doesn't suffer the same fate, he may be condemning Norris to it.
With the honeymoon phase over, Hamilton is in trouble
Hamilton entered 2025 on top of the world, buzzing that he was fulfilling his dream of driving for Ferrari. He remained there at the start of the season, not worrying too much about being generally slower than teammate Charles Leclerc and instead focusing on positives such as his sprint victory in China, but that honeymoon phase now seems very much over.
"It was horrible, not enjoyable at all," he said at the end of the race in Saudi Arabia, which he finished in seventh while Leclerc claimed third.
"At the moment, there is no fix, so this is how it's going to be for the rest of the year. It's going to be painful."
Adapting to a new team after over a decade at Mercedes and challenging Leclerc was always going to be a huge challenge, but maybe he'd hoped that the thrill of driving a Ferrari would unlock a level within him that would see him get back to glorious best, a level that he lost in his last few years at Mercedes. Now, he's realising that's not the case, and he's struggling with it.
If things don't pick up quickly, he'll begin to wonder whether he's still capable of competing with the best, and that's a slippery slope. F1 drivers constantly go on about how important it is to believe you're as good as anyone, and when that confidence goes, so too does the speed.
That can be seen in two of Hamilton's fellow veterans, Fernando Alonso and Vettel. Alonso has never once had a shadow of a doubt that he's still the best around, and he's still going strong at 43; Vettel began to question himself when he started looking second to Leclerc during his final Ferrari years, and never recovered.
Are we now going to see the second of the two drivers that dominated the 2010s have their career all but ended by Leclerc? To paraphrase Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, will Hamilton too go gentle into that good night? Or will he rage against the dying of the light?
