“Dear Diary…”
Welcome back to Dre’s Race Review, and it’s time for another weekend long running diary, as I tend to do for F1 Sprint weekends. This time the sport heads back to Miami for the first standalone F1 weekend (With a break either side), since Singapore last year. Shit. Between you and me readers, I started writing this on Friday night, because there’s been so much to talk about before the race has even started that it felt more fitting to update as I went rather than try and tell a story after everything was done. Hope that makes sense.
Right, let’s do a vibe check, on the 2025 Miami Grand Prix.
Friday – 15 More Miami Grand Prix
The big news heading into the weekend? Max Verstappen’s become a Dad. Congratulations to him and Kelly Piquet on the birth of Lily, their new daughter. My god, we’ve made the best racing driver on the planet a girl-dad. The new dad’s strength is going to be terrifying. Seriously, where did people get the idea that starting a family suddenly makes you slower? It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.
Okay, the actual important news – Miami’s been extended for a decade. It stays on the calendar until 2041, which is honestly so far in the future that it might be converted into a Sail GP venue if current climate change standards hold up.
I get it – It’s easy to rag on Miami. It represents so much of what people don’t like about where the sport is going. It’s a car park/street track with a layout people don’t like, in a calendar where the designated road course is going the way of the dodo, especially in Europe, the beating heart of the sport’s fandom. I don’t even dislike Miami all that much. It’s got three passing spots and has generally been okay for its racing quality since joining the calendar. It’s safely midfield in the power rankings for me, and some better tyres and I think we’d be cooking. But alas, I don’t think that’s all of why it’s so detested.
It’s become one of the biggest “influencer” races of the season. LEGO brought 10 lifesize F1 cars made out of millions of bricks to show off. Cadillac launched their team. WhatsApp had a bunch of them there to advertise “The Seat”, Kimi Antonelli’s Netflix documentary as Lewis Hamilton’s replacement. Thunderbolts* was there in full force, as was a full mockup of the AXS GP “garage” for the F1 Movie, with Kerry Condon and Jerry Bruckheimer in attendance. Love it or hate it, Miami from its first showing in 2022, has become the big US celebrity culture race, even more than Vegas that has since debuted. And it shows.
It’s always made me feel uneasy as someone whose background was wanting to be a journalist from years back in my YouTube days. I got my first paying gig as a journalist via WTF1 (The contract said content creator, whatevs) at the end of Miami’s first year in 2022. Within six months, I had to read the tea leaves as to where the brand was going, and it was cashing in on influencers.
They built a network of them in lightning quick time, and I immediately had the feeling of: “I’m fucked”. They were being invited onto the podcasts I was hosting, getting paid huge amounts of money for brand activations, making appearances in the rare standalone videos we were making at that point, and three months later, I was deemed surplus to requirements. And in a game of journalism, where access is everything, knowing you’re being shunted to the back of the line, stings.
Even more so in a sport like F1, where getting a foot in a door was notoriously impossible unless you worked for the big hitters… until a lot of content creators saw F1’s big gap in the market when the pandemic happened, Drive to Survive went viral, and a lot of people shoved their chips across the table thinking F1 was about to take off like the UFC did in the late 2000’s. And trust me, Cyril Abiteboul was no Anderson Silva.
Now it’s all over TikTok and Instagram. Big brands don’t need to lean on the press to tell their stories anymore and the people writing about it aren’t being built up – That would require paying them more internally. (And the entire writing business in the UK at least, is criminally underpaid as is) Now big business can just buy guaranteed coverage, control their own narratives, and cut out the middle man. It didn’t even have to be legally declared until a few years ago. It’s no secret that my own house snagged Matt and Tommy from P1, the biggest names in the business for their live shows, and I don’t think that runs cheap.
Personally, I’d much rather be a pundit and try to be informative (If you’ve watched me on YouTube or Instagram, you can tell), but it’s never going to hit like being there at the track with a creative jump cut and an dubbed line from a popular TV show. It saddens me that F1 is now such an inaccessible sport, that living that hollow experience through someone else’s iPhone is enough to bridge that gap.
I don’t like it, but I sure as hell respect the hustle. The game’s the game, and it’s massively changed in the last decade. Miami, is where that change has been the most visibly seen. If someone plays the song of the same name by Will Smith one more time on a reel, I’m jumping out of my bedroom window.
On the track, the moment of the day was more than clear – Kimi Antonelli taking a surprise Sprint Pole and beating both McLarens to do it. Mercedes looked really dialled in across the three shootout sessions, and I wasn’t convinced they had it in them after their strange call to run George Russell just once at the start of SQ3, but Kimi… wow.
He’s been having a really good rookie season so far, but it’s hard for him to truly shine because Russell has been insane this season, maximising every opportunity presented to him in 2025 and becoming the real leader of the team. So for Kimi to beat him straight-up for the first time this season (as well as everyone else), it’s the first real glimpse of the potential so many have been saying about him from his FRECA/Italian F4 days.
Toto Wolff can’t take the humble brag on this one, he was prepared to pay £130m to Max Verstappen to slam the door on this future potential, but he was absolutely right to think that Kimi could soften the blow of a Lewis Hamilton departure. And I say this sincerely, looking at Mercedes as a team right now… is he missed?
Saturday – Wet Swings And Roundabouts
I love that 90,000 headed for Miami thinking there was a 0% chance it was going to rain in an incredibly humid and hot part of the world. That’s adorable.
We got a deluge of rain in the hour leading up to the Sprint and in all their infinite wisdom, Ferrari sent Charles Leclerc out on Inters with a monsoon on track. In shocking news, he aquaplained at the kink on the back straight and went straight into the outside wall. Another Charles “Did Not Start”. Man.
But it speaks more to the embarrassing situation that F1 right now can’t handle anything more than light rain. Now to make this clear, Pirelli are not to blame. If anything, their tyres are too good at their jobs, the inter is a genuinely outstanding tyre that clears so much water and is durable. But with these cars now carrying so much topside downforce, alongside the ground effect aero from the floors, they shoot so much spray up in the air that visibility is practically zero. Something has to be done to improve this during the rainy days, otherwise we’re soon going to be at a point where F1 can’t race if rainfall is any more than a sprinkle.
Inevitably, we got a delayed start as a result. Once the water was cleared, we got a decent, if not chaotic sprint.
Even demigods like Kimi need lessons and Oscar Piastri just taught him one at Turn 1 of the Sprint. It was firm, but fair. Kimi after the fact? “Good to know”. He’ll be downloading firmware to help with that for next time.
And I’ll give him this, he did an exceptional job limiting the damage when he and Max Verstappen collided in the pits via an unsafe release. Remember when Red Bull had the best pit crew in the business? What happened? Combine that with their botching of Sprint Qualifying and Yuki Tsunoda missing the bell for his final lap and getting knocked out in SQ1, the operational excellence that made Red Bull what it is, looks flaky. Red Bull had a potential second, maybe even a win wiped out via a human error. Ouch.
And to be fair to Lando, all things being equal, he was probably due a rub of the green, him staying out the extra lap on the Inters, only to get a free-stop due to the Alonso wreck was one of those lucky breaks.
Qualifying’s now done and man, when it’s tight, Max just finds a way to get it done. .18 covering the Top 5 was nuts and looking back at the Ghost Laps, you can see that again, Lando lost it at the final corner. Max gained two car lengths under braking, and was much faster on exit. It backs up a lot of what I’ve been saying in that McLaren feels twitchy at its absolute limit and Norris doesn’t feel comfortable in the car to be able to push it like Max can with his Red Bull.
And I have to tip my hat to Max. The same week he becomes a dad, comes off a horrible Sprint that wasn’t his fault, refreshes, gets back in there and gets his third pole position of the season. Incredible mental resilience. A same tip of the hat to Lewis Hamilton, who went from the biggest winner of switching to slicks and taking third in the Sprint, to being eliminated in Q2 in qualifying. Man, that contrast must stink.
Worth noting as well that Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon were within half a second of pole position themselves. James Vowles might be cooking here.
Sunday – #BEATEMDOWN
Okay, I know I had a little chat about activations earlier but I can’t deny that LEGO’s have been tremendous. The best Driver’s Parade I’ve ever seen and seeing the driver’s genuinely having fun and taking each other out was hilarious. Worked to perfection.
Well… that was an ass-whooping. First of all, the Lap 1/Turn 1 Verstappen/Norris clash was a non-starter. You can’t be screaming karmic justice at Piastri laying out the hammer a fortnight ago on Verstappen and then he essentially does the same. He got to Turn 1 first and the stewards deemed that if you have the line for 1, you have it for Turn 2 as well, and he kept all four wheels on track despite the tank slapper. By the book, that’s fine. A part of me wonders if the dialogue in terms of racing tactics just boils down to unconscious bias against Verstappen because as a collective, “dirty driving” is most associated with him.
I’m genuinely stunned Max held onto that lead as long as he did, McLaren were in another dimension in race trim. This was the worst case scenario for what some people in the paddock feared in pre-season testing. The Sprint somewhat gave it away that they had maybe two tenths in hand… turns out on dry land, it was more like six, the upper end of the estimates I heard on how quick they were. Max did a great job defending from Piastri as long as he did, but a lock-up into Turn 1 sealed his fate, and that was job done.
But my goodness, it was frustrating watching Norris spend half a dozen laps trying to do the same. It’s the painful acknowledgement that the Brit is almost too timid to race Verstappen hard. I’m no expert, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching how he races people, it’s that Max will not let you beat him around the outside, he will take the apex and run you out, it’s his bread and butter.
I don’t want to sound too much like a boomer, but I suspect Piastri leaving a wheel in at Abu Dhabi last year sent a message that he wasn’t going to back down to Max’s tactics. Lando rightly or wrongly, isn’t prepared to go that far, and Max, one of the most intelligent racing drivers I’ve ever seen, knows that. He looks at Lando like the NBA’s Anthony Edwards looks at pro-creation.
Once the McLaren’s were 1-2, it was over. Piastri gained eight seconds seeing Norris and Verstappen beef each other, and that was all he needed, the former’s one of the best front-runners in F1 now. The terrifying thing was seeing that in a 1-stop, conventional GP with no major shenanigans, McLaren finished nearly 40 seconds ahead of George Russell’s Mercedes. It seems that team performance is a big variable and track dependent this year more than ever, but that is the biggest beating we’ve seen of a field in 2025, and a warning shot as to just how good things can be at Woking. The Constructors might already be done and we’re in May.
Further down the field – Ferrari were an absolute embarrassment. A fortnight ago, we were praising Charles Leclerc’s heroics for finishing just eight seconds off the win in Saudi Arabia. In Miami, they were off by nearly a minute and having the pettiest of squabbles over what was ultimately seventh and eighth place. They were the fifth fastest car in Miami, legitimately beaten by Alex Albon’s Williams and hassled by Carlos Sainz behind them all race long. The best thing about them this weekend was their friggin’ race suits.
Almost as concerning as their horrendous pace though, was the botched execution of the most simple of actions. This was a one-stop race. You intentionally split strategies with Hamilton starting on the hard tyre and Leclerc on the medium. You know full well that Hamilton would likely be quicker down the stretch, and instead of just asking for a basic swap and see if Lewis can chase down Kimi Antonelli, you wait for nearly half a dozen excruciating laps before telling Charles to swap.
It compromised any attempt at a Kimi chasedown, and then it led to Leclerc being stuck in a DRS train where he had to run close to Lewis because Carlos Sainz was right behind him. So much so that they swapped the cars back over again at the end because Leclerc was the quicker car and Hamilton’s mediums were cooked. And I’ve barely even mentioned the radio messages that were excruciating to listen to. I can’t remember Hamilton ever being that sassy on the radio, mentioning tea breaks and sarcastically asking if he was going to let Sainz through too.
This is the team that should have won the Constructor’s Championship last year. Six months later, you’re fourth in the standings, already had a double disqualification, and just one Grand Prix podium in six races. And I’d make an argument that you made your driver line-up worse. Don’t let the table fool you, Leclerc has been comfortably quicker than Lewis for most of the season so far.
As a team, they’re 152 points behind McLaren and we’re only a quarter of the way through the season. Wrap it up, Maranello, you’re done here. Might as well go all-in for 2026 now, because there’s nothing here for them now. And given the squabbles with the FIA about the ratios of electrical/ICE deployment for next year, it doesn’t sound like Ferrari’s too confident about that either…
Some other notes before I get out of here, a lightning round as it were – George Russell, despite suffering stomach cramps and having a horrible time qualifying, still got to to finish third, the best possible result on the table for Mercedes. Said it in Bahrain, will keep saying it, Driver of 2025 so far, barring maybe Oscar.
Aston Martin looks cheeks. When Fernando Alonso, a veteran of 400 Grand Prix, is spinning out on his own and you’re last on the road, you’re in big, big trouble. When Sauber are quicker than you, that’s a cry for help.
So at what point do we show serious concern for Liam Lawson’s racecraft? He’s been over-aggressive from Day 1 in F1, but this marked his fourth weekend with seriously questionable etiquette on track. Remember, he had 15 seconds of time penalties in Bahrain, left the track and gained an advantage in Saudi Arabia, and then got five seconds in Miami’s sprint and was lucky to not to be punished for squeezing Jack Doohan at Turn 1 in the race. Man needs to find his form again and quickly, or I fear Arvid Lindblad could be making an early debut.
Speaking of which, The Race dropped a bombshell article this morning saying that Jack Doohan might actually be dropped before Imola next week, which would be startling to me given the same site made the claim a fortnight ago that he was safe until the Summer Break. What led to them changing their tune so rapidly? It seems to me that the urge of the Argentine cash-injection of Franco Colapinto might be too much to resist after having already confirmed Doohan last August. (The Race also dropped that the country’s national oil company is a strategic partner for Alpine’s energy partner Eni. Funny that.)
The Verdict – 7/10 (Good): This was a pretty good Miami GP, half of what could have been a classic. Maybe if the predicted rain actually showed up, that would have thrown some more chaos around, but that didn’t happen. Say what you will about Miami, it’s producing decent racing and this was one of 2025’s better races so far. Hope you enjoyed the different format, I’m trying little things out with DRR this season, let me know what you thought of it, and catch you in Imola. IndyCar’s review of Barber will be out very soon too. Thanks for reading!
