The F1 Season Got Off To A Very Wet And Very Wild Start

When I wrote about the 2023 Australian Grand Prix, I figured it would be the most chaotic Melbourne race I’d ever recap. In fairness to the me of two years ago, it’s hard to top three red flag stoppages—something that hadn’t happened before and hasn’t happened since. However, the 2025 edition of the Melbourne race, this time the season opener, might have had it beat. It’s all thanks to one of the few elements of Formula 1 racing that the meticulous teams can’t control: rain.

After a dry weekend of practice sessions and qualifying—where McLaren continued their dominance from last season by putting both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri on the front row—the forecast for Sunday’s race called for rain, and the rain obliged. The Formula 2 race scheduled for the hours before the main event was cancelled, and even though the precipitation had mostly quieted down by the time the F1 cars got to the grid, the track was still sopping wet. It didn’t take long for things to get messy. On the formation lap before the start of the race, rookie VCARB driver Isack Hadjar lost control of his car and banged into the wall. It was a devastating debut for the 20-year-old (one so painful that it even got Anthony Hamilton, father of Lewis Hamilton, to walk over and console the rook) and a sign of things to come.

After a 15-minute delay to clear Hadjar’s car and get the wheels rolling again, the cars completed a successful, crash-free formation lap and set off. Norris shook off some of his first-lap problems from last season to hold off both Piastri and Max Verstappen—the latter of whom found more grip on his tires to pass Piastri straight away—and a race was on between last year’s first- and second-place finishers in the Drivers’ Championship. That race had to be put on hold almost immediately, though, as another rookie, Alpine’s Jack Doohan, lost control on a straightaway on lap one, crashing into the wall and bringing out a safety car. (Shame for Doohan, who is Australian.) Thanks to what he called a “power surge” in his new Williams car, Carlos Sainz joined Doohan on the wall during the safety car procedure, also ruining his first race for his new team. It was a disaster of a start, and it only got worse from there.

The thing about rainy races is that, in theory, they should be fascinating strategic battles, as teams gauge weather radars in order to figure out whether the wet weather tires, the intermediates, or the normal slick tires would be the better choice at any given time. However, this Australian Grand Prix had too many starts and stops to truly capitalize on that potential. After the first safety car came in, the race did have about 26 laps of intermediate tire racing, but it felt like almost every car was saving something in order to keep those tires on until the track dried enough to swap. On lap 33, another safety car came out after the most experienced driver on the grid, Fernando Alonso, followed the rookies’ lead and crashed his car into the wall. Alonso’s car was stranded in a tricky part of the course for rescue vehicles to get to safely, and so the ensuing safety car stayed out long enough that the track dried up enough to see all but the two Haas cars swap to slick tires.

I hope you’re still following here, because the action is about to get dumber. Roughly ten laps after Alonso’s crash, hometown hero Piastri went off the track twice in successive corners, and his second place standing dropped all the way to the back of the pack. Norris also spun his car at the same spot, but was able to recover and swap to intermediate tires ahead of incoming rain. When the rain returned, most teams decided to follow Norris’s lead and swap back to intermediates, while Ferrari tried to gamble and keep the hard tires they had switched onto during the Alonso safety car. This gamble failed almost immediately, as both cars lost grip on tires not made for this weather. Ferrari pitted soon after, with Hamilton dropping from a brief lead all the way down to ninth and Charles Leclerc going into tenth.

On lap 47, two more rookies saw the end of their races: On lap 46, Red Bull’s new second driver Liam Lawson made contact with the wall, while Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto went off the track and could not get enough traction to get back on. This brought out yet another safety car.

Once that safety car ended, it was a race to the finish between the two drivers most likely to contend for the individual title again this year, with both Norris and Verstappen on the same tires. Credit to Norris, who had been clear about wanting to win a head-to-head battle against Verstappen as soon as possible this year: The Brit did just that, overcoming a minor mistake on turn six to masterfully wrap up the last few laps of the race with Verstappen right on his tail. For most of the final laps, the reigning champion was within the DRS range of one second or less, but he could not find a spot to overtake Norris.

If the goal of a season-opener race is to get everyone excited for the campaign to come, then the Australian Grand Prix did its job in spades. Instead of a boring procession for the McLaren duo, who are in unquestionably the fastest car on the grid this year, it turned into a rollicking disaster. While it’s not the most fun to watch so many laps under a safety car, the fact that every new lap could bring chaos was more than enough to keep the viewers—and surely the drivers and teams themselves—on tenterhooks. It may not have been the best racing, but this race was as fascinating as it was messy. If the season to come follows suit, this will be a long year, thrilling and confounding in equal parts.