It’s high time for a long overdue F1 update, and like me, you may just have seen Lando Norries winning the Austrian GP, the 11th of the season. We’re thus not fully half way in as this season will coujnd 26 races, but not far from it, and even though we’re still two races out from formal half time, I would claim we’re well beyond it in terms of seeing where the season is heading – and the color of that is a solid orange. That’s however not the orange of Max Verstappen and the Netherlands we’ve gotten used to, but rather the papaya orange of McLaren!

That the team from Woking in the UK has emerged as the top team in 2025 is not a big surprise. After all they won the Constructors’ title last year and many counted them as favorites going into the season. What is perhaps more suprrising is that it’s not Lando Norris but Oscar Piastri who leads the ranking, even if it’s only 15 points ahead of Norris. McLaren has won eight of the 11 races so far this season, with Piastri winning five and Norris three. As a team McLaren is already way ahead of the three following teams Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull, with roughly twice as many points as the second Mercedes.

Another thing that the first 11 races of the season has made clear is that Red Bull has issues. It may not look it at first sight with Max Verstappen currently in P3 in the Drivers’ Championship, but the fact that he scored almost all the team’s points demonstrates – again – what we now know. Which is that Max is one hell of a driver, and the Red Bull car is one hell of a car, in the negative sense, for anyone but Max to drive.

Alex Albon couldn’t do it. Checo Perez was in the end so intimidated by the car that he could barely finish a race. Liam Lawson, to be fair, was never given a fair chance being kicked out after 2 1/2 races, and now it’s Yuki Tsunoda, who has proven many times in the past that he can drive, who cannot get to grips with the Red Bull car and just like Perez did, gets increasingly frustrated, thereby making mistakes. Max may bring out 110% of that same car, but that’s currently not enough to win races, and unless things change drastically, Red Bull won’t take neither the Drivers’, nor the Constructors’ title this year.

Red Bull also suffers in this sense against both Mercedes and Ferrari, which both have two drivers who regularly score points. Kimi Antonelli is not at George Russell’s level, but with 63 points scored so far this season, he still ranks seventh in the Drivers’s behind his team mate Russell, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton as the leading rookie. The latter would certainly have wished to be at least on a podium this season which hasn’t happened yet, but he’s had an ok start at Ferrari and with significant updates to the car coming out just before today’s race in Austria where Ferrari finished on P3 and P4, it bodes rather well for the coming races.

In my first post after the first race in the season, I speculated that Williams could be the positive surprise this year. To the extent that the team scores points regularly, mostly through Alex Albon and so far less with Carlos Sainz, I guess that was correct, but there’s a long way to go from the top four teams to Williams and the rest, although Williams are now somewhere in between the midfield and the top teams. In Austria however, Sainz couldn’t start as his whole break system locking up and going up in flames before the race start. Not necessarily something that should happen to an aspiring top team.

As we are (almost) half way into the season, it’s thus difficult to imagine anything other than McLaren winning both the Constructors’ and the Drivers’ titles this year, but it’s far more difficult to say if it’ll be Lando or Oscar winning the title. And as things heat up in the second half, that may of course have implications on the harmony in the team, which still pretty much looks to be total. Whoever it is, it will be McLaren’s first Driver’s title since 2008, when Lewis Hamilton secured it with less than a lap to go at the Brazilian GP, winning it by a single point. Chances are there will be less drama this year, at least between McLaren and other teams, if not necessarily within the orange team…

Speaking of harmony, we’ll also see how Max handles no longer being in the fastest car. In Spain he drove into the side of George Russell out of sheer frustration you have to think, since Max doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes. On the other hand, his genius move in the second corner of the Emilia Romagna GP that he went on to win is the kind of thing only a world champion would dare – and succeed with. Unfortunately though, the opportunities for doing so to win races seem ot be diminishing as the season progresses.

After today’s race in Austria, we’re off to Silverstone next for the British GP, which is of course also McLaren’s home GP. It’s also the home race off both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton, and perhaps Lewis’s first podium? A week from now we’ll know!