Another Masi masterclass and going Full Ferrari - Things you might've missed from the Australian Grand Prix

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari, Australia, 2025 — Photo: © IMAGO

Australian Grand Prix

Another Masi masterclass and going Full Ferrari - Things you might've missed from the Australian Grand Prix

Melbourne was a busy place on Sunday

Chris Deeley

Sunday 16 March 2025 13:57

Blimey.

The first race of the 2025 Formula 1 season wasn't one to sleep through, it turned out. One of the most chaotic season-openers in the sport's history wasn't at any point dull, even before it officially started.

If you decided not to wake up in the middle of the night and just catch the highlights with your fry-up this morning, you've come to the right place. Neither Sky nor F1 will manage to pack everything that happened in Australia into a 10-minute YouTube package. You'll miss things. That's where we come in.

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F1 RESULTS TODAY: Max Verstappen beaten as F1 champion crashes out of thrilling Australian Grand Prix

We had a whole team up and watching the race (through a haze of coffee and hash browns, admittedly) and caught all the things you might not get to see.

Heck, you might actually see them and then completely forget about them because WHOOPS another driver's in the wall. That's the kind of day it was.

The safety car saw a lot of action in Melbourne

Never go Full Ferrari

It's easy to make fun of Ferrari's strategy choices (fun, too!) but the buffoonery hit new heights on Sunday.

No, this isn't about the tyre decision/mis-reading of weather radars that cost Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc valuable points, as predictable as that was.

This is about Charles Leclerc radioing into the pit wall to ask if there was some kind of leak inside his car, saying "I have a seat full of water. Like, full of water!"

Words of wisdom from his race engineer Bryan Bozzi? "Must be the water."

Cheers mate.

A very Masi safety car restart

F1 fans will probably never forget Michael Masi's name, or his decision to take the rules into his own hands when it came to lapped cars coming through under safety car conditions in Abu Dhabi.

As it happened, the former FIA race director was in Australia this weekend. And as it happened, there was another piece of safety car lapped driver weirdness that benefitted Max Verstappen.

Under the second safety car of the day, lapped cars were all allowed through – but then Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon came in for late pitstops, the former coming out between Verstappen and the McLarens ahead of him on the very lap the safety car was supposed to come in.

Bearman was allowed back through for a second time before the restart after some deliberation, allowing Verstappen to close right up on the papaya cars as the race went green again.

The curse of...winning?

Everything seemed to be lining up for Carlos Sainz, at the track where he won with Ferrari last year. A better car than expected, top-10 qualifying, his old team looking off the pace. All peachy...until he crashed after a lap.

It might not have been all his fault, though. It could have been...fate?

Check this out – the last three winners of the race have all failed to make it past the third lap of the following season's race. Lando Norris, you have been warned.

Isack Hadjar's F1 debut could scarcely have gone worse

To Hadj and to hold

Isack Hadjar's reaction to his formation lap slip-up was so heartrending, some of us at GPFans Towers actually felt bad for finding the spectacle of a driver crashing before the start of the race funny. Which, to be clear, it was and always is.

The Racing Bulls rookie was visibly distraught as he walked back to the garage, keeping his helmet on and appearing to be crying as he trudged back.

Enter Anthony Hamilton, father of seven-time world champion Lewis, who went and found Hadjar and put his arms around him, walking him back to the garage while giving him a little pep talk. A quietly lovely moment on a horrible afternoon for the youngster.

Age and experience

It was a rotten day for the F1 rookie class, especially if you include Liam Lawson and Ollie Bearman (which you shouldn't, because they've driven more than two races in a previous season).

Hadjar's afternoon ended earliest, but Jack Doohan only made it a few corners further, and Gabriel Bortoleto binned his Sauber in the late rainstorm that shook up the pack.

Bearman was just plain slow in a slow Haas, having started from the pitlane, and Lawson hit the barriers almost simultaneously with Bortoleto – leaving Kimi Antonelli as the only point-scoring rookie, and even he lost a place at the end because of a time penalty. [Edit: no he didn't, they just overturned it, why do they hate me?]

Age and experience must've told in such tricky conditions, right? Absolutely. Except Fernando Alonso destroyed his Aston Martin too, and he's been racing in F1 since before any of the rookie class was born. Oops.

Max Verstappen Mercedes Formula 1