Flying Papaya caps off the first half of the Formula 1 season

The first half of the 2025 season came to a close at Silverstone with a McLaren one-two at its home race. This puts the icing on the cake for a first half of the year that has been widely dominated by the Papaya Boys: nine victories, seven pole positions and 20 podium finishes out of a possible total of 24. All in all it has been a dream return for the team, with only a handful of crumbs left to be shared out by the other competitors. What's striking is that McLaren has collected more points altogether than the sum of the second and third teams in the standings: Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have amassed 460 of them, compared to the grand total of 432 for Ferrari (222) and Mercedes (210).

Of the four top teams, McLaren is also the only one to have improved its return (+56%) in comparison with the first 12 races of 2024: Mercedes has dipped by 5 percent, Ferrari has had a substantial drop (-26%) while Red Bull has fallen off a cliff (-54%). The team from Milton Keynes is showing how hard it is to compete when there is just one driver contributing to the points total: of the 172 points they have collected, 165 of them have come thanks to Max Verstappen.

The four-time world champion has lost 90 points compared to last year (-35%) but a driver who is faring even worse is Carlos Sainz (-133) who has clearly paid the price for his switch from Ferrari to Williams. Yet Lewis Hamilton, who took the Spaniard's place at Maranello, hasn't improved his haul either compared to his final season with Mercedes: seven fewer points and, crucially, not a single visit to the podium whereas last year it was at Silverstone itself that he took a beautiful victory to add to his third-place finish at Barcelona. Staying with Ferrari, Charles Leclerc has dropped too (-21%, down from 150 to 119 points).

So it's only at Woking where they are laughing, with Piastri up a massive +89% and Norris also rising by +32%: the fight for the title genuinely seems to be a matter for internal debate in the Papaya team, just as its second consecutive Constructors' Championship is also on the way. It's true that last year Red Bull had a 78-point lead over McLaren at the halfway stage yet it still finished 77 points behind but today's technical situation seems very different.

Behind the top four teams, the situation has radically changed since last year. The bottom two from 2024, Williams and Sauber, have now jumped up to fifth and sixth place in the standings. Twelve months ago the team led by James Vowles had only four points to its name while the Swiss team that still had Andreas Seidl at the helm – at least for a couple more weeks – was in the depressing state of having none at all. Today Williams has 59 points while Sauber has 41, and in the last four races the Swiss outfit has even scored more points than Red Bull!
By contrast, Aston Martin is in freefall having slipped from fifth place to eighth, with less than half of last year's total (down from 68 to 32 points). This drop is attributable more to Fernando Alonso (-64%) than Lance Stroll (-13%).

The other three teams have all improved their points haul (Haas +7%, Racing Bulls +16% and Alpine up by a whopping +111%). This confirms that there is a much more equal distribution of points between the teams, even given the fact that there have been a total of 46 fewer points at stake this year.
In fact, in the first 12 races of 2024 there had already been three Sprint races so far (compared to just two in 2025). Furthermore points were still awarded for the driver with the fastest race lap, a bonus that has been removed from the rulebook this year. In the first 12 races of this year the top four teams have amassed 1064 points between them, 82% of the total, whereas last year they had taken 90% of everything available.

At the start of the year there were five rookies (Kimi Antonelli, Isack Hadjar, Ollie Bearman, Gabriel Bortoleto, Jack Doohan) even if not all of them have made it this far. Taken overall, the best performer has been Antonelli (63 points including the highlight of his podium in Montreal). But the first half of the year has also seen some impressive form from Hadjar (21) considering he is driving one of the Racing Bulls. Doohan was left without a ride after six races when he was replaced by another semi-rookie Franco Colapinto, though so far the latter has also failed to get off the mark, leaving the total for both Alpine's second drivers at zero.