McLaren’s Las Vegas disqualifications cost them record points score in 2025

For the 31st time since the world championship began in 1950, the drivers’ title was decided at the final round of the season.

Lando Norris clinched the title in his 152nd grand prix start. Only three drivers started more races than him before becoming world champion, though as is often the case with statistics like this, that is partly due to the fact current seasons are so much longer than they used to be.

For example, Nigel Mansell took two dozen more races to win his first championship in 1992, but his career was almost twice as long as Norris’s at that point. Mansell won the title eight days after his 39th birthday; Norris turned 26 last month.

The five drivers who started the most grands prix before winning the world championship only won the title once, though Norris can still change that. Unless, of course, he does what Rosberg did nine years ago at tonight’s FIA Gala and shocks F1 by announcing his retirement.

In F1’s first title-decider involving more than two drivers since 2010, all three went into the final race with seven grand prix wins apiece. Max Verstappen’s victory means he won more races than anyone this season, for the fifth year in a row.

Verstappen is also the first driver to win more races than the champion since 2016, when Lewis Hamilton took 10 wins to Rosberg’s nine. Norris’s seven wins is the fewest for a world champion since 2012, when Sebastian Vettel won the world title with just five (four of which came in the final seven races).

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For the second year in a row, Verstappen scored all of Red Bull’s wins. They end the year with a total of 130 victories, leaving them one shy of Mercedes, the only team besides Red Bull and McLaren to win this year.

McLaren’s 14 wins were divided equally between Norris and Oscar Piastri. This is the second-highest number of wins they’ve ever taken in a season, though as an achievement winning 14 out of 24 grands prix is some way behind their 1988 feat of winning 15 out of 16.

Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost scored eight and seven wins respectively that year in the team’s dominant MP4/4. The record for most wins over a season is held by Red Bull, who won all bar one of the 24 rounds in 2023.

Verstappen’s season-ending win means he is the only driver to have won at the same track more than once in the four years since F1 introduced its ‘ground effect’ regulations in 2022. This included winning all four races at Suzuka during this time, and he was also undefeated at Imola and Losail, which held three grands prix each.

He rounded off the season with his 10th consecutive podium finish, which is only the seventh time in F1 history anyone has reached double digits. Verstappen’s personal best is 15, during his dominant 2023 campaign, but Michael Schumacher still holds the record with 19 podiums in a row, which included all 16 races during the 2002 season.

Yuki Tsunoda failed to score in his final race for Red Bull and ensured he ended the season with the largest points deficit to a team mate in F1 history. He ended the year 388 points behind Verstappen, and dropped 355 to him over their 22 rounds as team mates. This smashed the previous record, set in 2023, when Verstappen out-scored Sergio Perez by 290 points.

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Ferrari had little to celebrate as they endured their first win-less season since 2021. Charles Leclerc at least managed to pick up his first fastest lap of the season, meaning he now has 11 in his career, the same as George Russell.

But Hamilton dropped out in Q1 in the final three rounds, something no one else did. He failed to finish on the podium in a single grand prix all year, which has never happened to him before, nor to any Ferrari newcomer since Didier Pironi in 1981.

Having finished just 14 points behind champions McLaren last year, Ferrari fell to fourth in the standings, 435 points behind this year. Unsurprisingly, McLaren achieved their highest ever points tally with 833, though that fell shy of the record of 860 Red Bull set over a shorter, 22-round season in 2023. The 30 points McLaren lost due to their double disqualification in Las Vegas clearly cost them.

That was the only round all season in which McLaren failed to score. However, in an unusually competitive year, this happened to every team at least once, for the first time since points were extended to cover the top 10 places. The last season in which every team posted at least one ‘zero’ was 2008.

As a result, although Alpine finished last, they had the highest points score for any last-placed team. Again, the points system has a bearing on this: Toro Rosso would have finished last in 2009 with 29 points compared to the 22 Alpine took this year. Alpine, like Ferrari and others, will be hoping their decision to down tools early on their 2025 effort will lead to more positive numbers for them next year.

Over to you

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2025 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

• McLaren’s Las Vegas disqualifications cost them record points score in 2025
• 2025 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend F1 driver ratings
• Antonelli asked team how many points Verstappen lost title by after online abuse
• Norris vs Verstappen vs Piastri: Full radio transcript from their championship showdown
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