Dre’s Race Review – F1’s 2025 United States Grand Prix

“Why do I hear boss music?”

Welcome back to the second half of another DRR Double Bill, and this time it’s for Round 19 of the 2025 Formula 1 World Championship, as the travelling circus heads to Austin and the Circuit of the Americas for the United States Grand Prix. As its a Sprint weekend, I decided to bring back the three-day diary format include huge news on F1’s broadcasting future, the Sprint clash heard around the world as the McLaren’s accidentally wiped each other out, and how Max Verstappen blossomed into a genuine threat for the Championship again. Enjoy. 

Friday - F1 TV’s New American Home

There was big news going into the weekend that you could kinda tell was coming. My old employers at Autosport had another one of their business exchange shows in Austin, and Apple’s Eddy Cue (Senior Vice President of Services), was there to talk about the F1 movie, Apple’s role in that and what they were going to do with the sport, just a day before the inevitable announcement - Apple won the war with ESPN for coverage of F1 in North America from 2026 onwards.

It’s a drop in the bucket for the tech giant, but it blows away anything TV wise F1’s made in the US from Day 1. A decade ago, F1 couldn’t give its races away stateside, now Apple just paid $750 million for the next 5 years of coverage in North America. F1 TV will no longer be available directly to the US, with its coverage moving to Apple TV’s streaming service, at no extra cost alongside its premium, $13 a month subscription. 

Now, I know Americana is a bit of me, and while I’m not an expert on US TV matters, I know enough from other examples where I can say confidently… I’m nervous about this. Here’s why. 

First of all - Scope of coverage. Apple TV, like other streaming services, don’t put their figures out there publicly, but it’s said that they have 51 million subscribers on their platform. How many of those are going to watch F1 coverage, a niche sport in the US that right now is clocking at around 1.5 million viewers, roughly half of the average NASCAR race? 

These races are on a platform that’s far less accessible than cable TV (Although they will give a handful of races away without needing to subscribe). Customers are already being forced to choose between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime TV, HBO Max, and not to mention other sports that have in-house streaming like the NFL, NBA and Baseball, often with far bigger audiences. That’s a very congested space and Apple may have to get their elbows out marketing wise to lure people in. They can’t all be Ted Lasso.

At $630m, turns out F1 The Movie is Brad Pitt's highest ever earning movie. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

It leads me into my next issue - How do you grow this thing? How do you convince people that aren’t on the F1 wagon that adding the sport is enough to justify $13 a month for it? It’s something that probably wasn’t thought about when MotoGP had its TV rights in the UK moved from BBC2 to TNT Sports. A million viewers a race series now sits at around 100,000 and British interest in bike racing at MotoGP level has never felt bleaker. I’ve moaned about it a lot on this site but it’s worth saying - If you’re a bike fan, is £34 a month a fair price for TNT? It probably isn’t when Warner Bros are competing against Sky across the other side of London.

Apple’s already dipped its toes in the water with live sport - A baseball game of the week has been fine with high production values and alternative pundits like Katie Nolan going down well, but their other large investment, MLS Soccer, has been a bust. They paid $250m a year for 10 years of the league’s coverage off the back of Lionel Messi moving from PSG to Inter Miami, in the hope that people would hop on the wagon. They didn’t. The MLS Cup Final on FOX suffered a 47% drop in ratings from 2023 to 20241. Good news! The MLS is rich! Bad news! No one cares! That’s what I fear could happen to F1 if people aren’t prepared to make the switch.

I get it - People want to be excited, people love Apple as a brand, I know I do as a man typing this on a Macbook Pro, next to my iPhone 16 and Watch Series 2 on my wrist. There’s potential for this to be the WWE Network, who were years ahead of the curve to have a standalone network with archive, live premium events and all their content in one place for $10 a month, but they already have strong TV coverage and conventional PPV to back them up. This is an all-in gambit and I’m not convinced the market is there for Apple to justify spending three quarters of a billion on it, and I think F1’s just took the easy way out to follow the big check. I await to be proven wrong.

As for Sprint Qualifying, Max Verstappen with another pole position, narrowly beating Lando Norris by seven hundredths of a second, ahead of Oscar Piastri three tenths back in third. Props to Nico Hulkenberg for a sensational 4th in the Sauber, a car that’s always gone well when they lower their ride heights, and Fernando Alonso sixth for Aston Martin, impressive stuff. 

Less said about Ferrari the better here. 

Saturday - Happy Fun Crashes

Sprint Saturday and… oh shit. 

Turn 1 is one of F1’s worst bottleneck starting corners, and 2025 was no exception. Max nails his start and takes Turn 1 first, but behind, chaos ensues. Lando Norris brakes late to get to the Turn 1 apex alongside Piastri. Piastri gets pushed wide, but instead goes for an aggressive cutback on the exit. Unfortunately for him, he’s the meat in a three-car sandwich, as he hits Nico Hulkenberg, breaking his front wing, and Fernando Alonso, who loses a tire and is out. Oh and the small matter of HITTING Lando Norris. Both McLaren’s are out on the spot and Verstappen beats George Russell and Carlos Sainz after two Safety Cars, the second coming after Lance Stroll locked up massively into Turn 1 and completely collected Esteban Ocon. A reminder, it's Year 10 of Lance Stroll next season. TEN. 

What a fucking mess. And of course, the comedy scenario I suspect a bunch of Verstappen fans were hoping for, a McLaren self-immolation like at the end of The Da Vinci Code. 

My take? While I think the stewards were ultimately correct in not approporting predominant blame towards one person - Questions have to be asked of Oscar Piastri on this one. He could have taken the longer outside line, even leaving the track for self-preservation sake if he had to, but he went for the cutback to try and stick it to Norris, and paid the price. Hulkenberg in the middle had nowhere to go and Alonso was an innocent bystander. 

And now, this leaves McLaren in a very precarious situation. Given the weekend started with Lando admitting he’d been punished internally by McLaren after being blamed post-race for his tangle in Singapore, is Piastri now not equally as accountable for taking Lando out as well as himself here? Either you punish both, or none in my opinion. No-one took McLaren’s Papaya Rules seriously until the literal interpretation of them was applied in Singapore, but here we are. Fair's fair, right?

Max Verstappen survived an early assault by George Russell to win the Sprint after a late nasty crash between Lance Stroll and Esteban Ocon brought out another Safety Car. And with it, he reduces his Championship deficit down to 55 points.

Oh, and just to ramp up the pressure even more, an empathic pole position for the GP for Verstappen. A quarter of a second faster than the field, with Lando going to second on his final lap ahead of Charles Leclerc, with Oscar Piastri down in sixth place, his lowest result in Q3 this season in the sessions he’s finished. We don’t speak of Baku. Oh boy…

Sunday - Don’t Call It A Comeback

Oh shit. Again. McLaren might genuinely be in some trouble here. A flawless drive from Max Verstappen at the front. Held his nerve on the opening lap, was quicker than Charles Leclerc on the soft tire, and it never looked like he was out of control. That’s the beauty of Max, if the car is quick enough, he’s as safe as houses. 

It didn’t help that McLaren had two more minor problems - One, Lando Norris was stuck behind Charles Leclerc and couldn’t pass him until the end of their first tire stint, and two, Oscar Piastri was completely anonymous in a lonely fifth place, arguably his worst non-Baku weekend of 2025. 

I’ll say this much - I was impressed with Lando’s pass on Charles down the stretch with six laps to go. The surprise send at Turn 1 didn’t ultimately work, but forcing Charles to defend brought him three tenths closer, setting up the Turn 12 pass instead. Superb bit of racecraft between the pair of them, fair, clean, and impressive on all fronts. Leclerc was 3rd as well as Driver of the Day and it was richly deserved for a superb drive and great to see Ferrari genuinely competitive for the first time in a while. 

We have to talk about the title situation though, and it is officially “squeeky bum time” in the McLaren camp. Piastri still leads, but only by 14 points over Norris, while Verstappen is only 40 behind with five weekends left. The required run rate went from 10.5 to 8 overnight, and all of a sudden, Max has a genuine shot if he can run the table. After Piastri’s win in Zandvoort, he had a horror show in Baku, and was largely mediocre in Monza and Singapore. Not the dominant front runner we know he can be.

It ramps up the pressure on a McLaren camp that’s always had a wishy-washy approach about how to handle its two star drivers. In fact, looking at the lay of the land, their “fairs fair in fair and war” approach is about to face its greatest test. Because no matter how you slice it, this policy probably wasn’t built for Piastri losing 64 points to Max Verstappen over the last four weekends. 

If you’re McLaren, you probably have three options:

Maintain Status Quo: Keep trying to play it by ear and being as “fair” as possible. You’re more likely to be able to convince either driver to play along given your history, and being able to control the controllables is important. However, it opens the door for more inconsistent results given both Norris and Piastri are pretty evenly matched on paper across the season. If you do it, and both drivers keep changing up second and third places, it opens the door further for Max to punish you. And of course, the elephant in the room - Can you guarantee that both drivers won’t go rogue between now and December and go into business for themselves?

Back Piastri: If you’re being pragmatic, back the leading driver as it gives the best chance, on paper. Piastri still has a 14 point lead, has led the Championship for most of the season, and beats Norris on most of the key head-to-heads. 

However, the Aussie’s in a rough patch. Since his last win in Zandvoort, he was asked to swap in a disadvantage deal in Monza for 3rd, was terrible in Baku, and has been rather anonymous in Singapore, losing to Norris from behind to finish 4th, and now 5th in Austin. Lando’s the hot hand right now and going all in on a first-time challenger who hasn’t looked like the title leader he’s been for a while, is all kinds of risky. Not to mention, if you’re Zak Brown, the face of the brand, the 7-year partnership with Lando, the former CEO of Lando’s Quadrant… are you telling that man to shut it down for the year? Good luck.

Back Norris: Or you back your staple driver. Lando had a rough start to 2025 adapting to a McLaren he admitted he influenced more towards outright speed over comfort. But he’s gotten better as the year has went on, mitigating mistakes, showing some aggression and he’s been better in race trim across the season. Moving goalposts is never an exact science, but it’s hard not to pin him as title leader if it weren’t for 18 lost points in Zandvoort. But do you want to piss off the Tumblr girlies and the red rag to the bull from a PR standpoint and have people believe that this was the plan from the start? And no matter how you read it, backing Norris gives you a smaller margin for error. 

Regardless, McLaren was hitting the break looking like one of the all-time dominant F1 teams. They’ve now gone winless in four after winning the previous five. Verstappen has outscored them as a team since the break and he’s got a car that can now compete with McLaren after redesigning its front wing and floor package. The plus for McLaren is, Max still pretty much has to be perfect to keep this title chance alive. But I know where I’d rather be in this title fight right now.

For the first time we can truly say in 2025 - Game on.

The Lightning Round

Zak Brown had to sheepishly apologise to Nico Hulkenberg after calling him an amateur after wrongly blaming him for the Sprint crash. Alongside his rather... bold comments made during the Alex Palou court case, I love seeing Zak reaping what he sows as the face of the brand. Marketing dudes. Gotta love em'.

Pirelli tried skipping a tire compound like they did with Spa by going C1, 3 and 4, only this time it really didn't work. The C1 was so slow on Friday that the teams blatantly went 10 laps more than needed on the Medium and turned the race into a Medium/Soft 1-stopper. Bless them for trying, but Pirelli keep swinging and keep missing.

So first Lewis Hamilton asking Perplexity for answers on Twitter, to Mercedes embracing Meta AI on their helmets. I hope it goes as well for them as the crypto investments did earlier in the decade!

Good to see Laurent Meikes immediately realise that a more driveable car is a better car, and Yuki Tsunoda has found some better results since taking over. The pack watch if Meikes can bring a title back at the first of asking will be generational against Mr Horner.

Doesn’t stop Red Bull from being sneaky as fuck in other ways. The team copped a 50,000 euro fine for having a member of the team come back out to the grid after the formation lap started after trying to remove the reference tape in Lando Norris’ grid box. Not so mad about the tape removal, gamesmanship is a huge part of Motorsport, but you’ve breached a safety rule in order to do so, holding up the marshals that are trying to seal off the track as the cars come back around. The FIA’s been meaning to clampdown on this behaviour since the Neymar incident in 2023, and the photographers nearly getting run over in Baku. Red Bull are lucky it was “only” 50K. Dumb shit.

Turn 17 ended up being an honorary corner of poor judgement for the weekend. Ollie Bearman in particular had a tough time with it, going off the track to defend himself during the Sprint and taking a 10-second penalty. Carlos Sainz then didn’t back out a pass attempt there quickly enough during the race and took himself and Kimi Antonelli out for 5-grid places, and then Bearman had to take to the grass and spun to avoid Yuki Tsunoda. In Bearman’s defence, Tsunoda probably did move a bit under braking but a lunge from Bearman’s distance was never really possible anyway. 

Good to see COTA extended to 2034. It’s now for me, one of the premier all-round racing tracks in the world, great for F1, MotoGP and the World Endurance Championship. Obviously having a more fan-centric staple American race is great for Liberty Media alongside Miami and Vegas, more for the high-end tourists, and it’s hard to argue with a 450,000 record attendance this year… even if COTA got cheeky and called it a four-day total, like anyone cares who goes to the track on Thursday. Very Silverstone.

Then again, well done COTA for naming Turn 20 after Mario Andretti and calling him F1’s only American World Champion, like Phil Hill didn’t exist. Whoops.

Alpine issued Team Orders to Franco Colapinto while he was in 17th place and defending from a faster Gabriel Bortoleto to hold positions. Seriously, what the hell are they doing? Just miserable from the French time and classic Briatore needless meddling. It genuinely angered me while watching the end of the race.

Speaking of, glad TV direction learned its lesson from Singapore and actually cut to Lewis Hamilton’s slow puncture at the end of the race and Oscar Piastri trying tio gun him down. A shame they missed Nico Hulkenberg pass Ollie Bearman after his spin to show the replay first, but we’ll consider it a work in progress.

The Verdict: 6.5/10 (Decent) - You know what? Given Max was a comfortable seven second winner, I rather enjoyed this race. A great, close fight between Norris and Leclerc took a lot of the headlines and deservedly so, it was very enjoyable to watch. Sprinkle in some decent midfield action and better TV direction and this was a pleasant race. COTA delivers. See you in Mexico.