2025 F1 Report Cards: Abu Dhabi Ratings Fuel Fierce Debate Over True Stars

Under the glare of Yas Marina’s floodlights, with tyre smoke hanging in the warm desert air, the 2025 season didn’t end when the chequered flag fell – it ended hours later, when the report cards landed. Abu Dhabi driver ratings and season-long scoreboards have turned Lando Norris’s title and Max Verstappen’s victory into the latest front in F1’s never‑ending argument: who really drove best in 2025?

On paper, Abu Dhabi was Verstappen’s night and Norris’s year. RaceFans logged the Dutchman as pole‑sitter and race winner with an 8/10 score, behind the 9/10 they handed to Charles Leclerc and Fernando Alonso for dragging truculent machinery into the sharp end. Crash.net went further, giving Verstappen 9.5 for what it called a perfect weekend and the Ferrari and Aston Martin leaders matching 9.5 scores of their own, while Norris’s measured title‑sealing third place drew just 8. RacingNews365 crowned Verstappen with a flawless 10, Norris on 9 and Leclerc and Alonso on 8, underlining how differently the same 58 laps can be read once the dust – and the DRS trains – settle.

Those numbers reveal the fault line in modern driver rankings. Some outlets reward pure execution in clear air; others weight heroics in dirty air, tyre nursing through a narrow pit window or bold calls on the undercut. RaceFans highlighted how Leclerc wrung everything out of an ill‑handling Ferrari for fifth on the grid and how Alonso “clearly got the most of the car”, while Edd Straw’s rankings for The Race framed Verstappen’s win as a model of execution but also dwelt on how Esteban Ocon, Leclerc and Alonso punched above their machinery. The common thread: Abu Dhabi may have been relatively light on shock twists, but under the skin analysts saw a study in pressure management from all three title protagonists.

If the finale split opinion, the season‑long report cards have blown it wide open. Nine’s Wide World of Sports handed new champion Norris a perfect 10/10 for finally “realising his potential” in a tight three‑way fight and marked Verstappen at 9/10 even as he called 2025 one of his finest campaigns. RacingNews365’s Abu Dhabi table, though, shows Verstappen with the best season‑average rating at 8.4, ahead of Norris on 7.8 and Oscar Piastri on 7.5. The Telegraph went further, combining race‑by‑race grades with qualifying head‑to‑heads and penalty points to produce a ladder where, as their headline bluntly put it, “Norris misses out on top spot”.

Further down the grid, the grades are even more brutal. Sky Sports’ season ratings put Charles Leclerc’s consistency in sharp statistical relief – 19-5 up on Lewis Hamilton in qualifying and 242-156 ahead on points – while The Telegraph calls Hamilton’s first Ferrari year “a bitter disappointment” and notes he failed to stand on the podium once as Leclerc claimed seven. RaceFans and Crash.net both score Hamilton only 6/10 for Abu Dhabi after another Q1 exit and a recovery drive to eighth, the kind of undercut‑free slog through traffic that once would have been routine podium territory for him. In contrast, rookies Isack Hadjar and Oliver Bearman are showered with praise: Sky describes Hadjar as a “rookie of the year” contender with a maiden podium at Zandvoort, while outlets from Nine to Motorsport Magazine hail Bearman’s late‑season surge and that fourth place in Mexico as proof he’s Ferrari material.

The drivers themselves only fuel the debate. Verstappen emerged from defeat contextualising 2025 as one of his best campaigns, while Hamilton’s frustrations with Ferrari’s peaky SF‑25 and the physically punishing current‑gen cars boiled over as the year closed.

"Yeah, I think so, I mean I have no regrets of my season, I think the performance has been strong,"

— Max Verstappen, speaking after Abu Dhabi as quoted by Nine’s Wide World of Sports

"was not a single thing [he'll] miss about these cars. Simple as that. Literally there's nothing."

— Lewis Hamilton, speaking to Nine’s Wide World of Sports

Strip away the numbers and a pattern emerges from all these report cards. Norris’s champion’s calm under fire, Verstappen’s relentless peak pace, Piastri’s streaks of brilliance and fragility, Leclerc and Alonso’s habit of dragging wayward cars into places they had no right to be, the rookies swaggering into DRS trains they were supposed to fear – that is the real syllabus of 2025. In a few months the grid will roll into Melbourne with lighter, twitchier cars and a new rulebook, and every grade will be wiped clean. But the arguments born under the Abu Dhabi lights about who truly delivered this season will echo long into the next chapter.