Formula 1 2025: Three disappointing performers

The Papaya outfit's two drivers are currently locked in a championship battle for the ages, with Lando Norris' surprise victory in Hungary cutting his championship deficit to teammate Oscar Piastri down to just nine points. With ten races remaining, online sports betting sites can't split the two.

The latest odds from the popular Bodog sports betting site currently have the championship-leading Piastri listed as the -175 favorite, with his more experienced teammate Norris just behind at +130.

But while these two have been battling it out at the front of the grid, F1’s relentless calendar also forges casualties—those who find themselves becalmed or lost in the aggregate of missed opportunity, adaptation woes, or devastating errors.

As summer’s heat peaks and championship equations intensify, three names stand out amid the swirling dust as disappointments. Perhaps some of the verdicts are somewhat harsh, but nevertheless, here are our most disappointing performers of the 2025 F1 season thus far.

If you only skim the statistics, you might think Lando Norris is in the midst of a stellar campaign: five wins, untouchable qualifying laps, and a sense of urgency that’s become his trademark. But close inspection, and the chorus of post-race analyses, reveals a more tragic arc: the squandering of supremacy, the corrosive drip of what-ifs.

When Piastri joined McLaren at the start of last season, his more experienced British teammate was considered the team's unquestionable top dog. Across the four years prior, he had emerged as McLaren's main man, regularly outperforming his car and seeing off the challenges of former teammates Carlos Sainz and Daniel Ricciardo. But Piastri's arrival changed everything.

Even in the Aussie's debut campaign with the team, cracks were beginning to form. Norris managed to get himself into a 2024 title fight with Max Verstappen; however, a slew of errors saw his challenge never seriously mount. Add to that the fact that Piastri was regularly just as fast as the Brit, and it becomes clear why McLaren were never truly comfortable with backing Norris wholeheartedly last season.

Those same mistakes have crept into 2025. Norris hasn’t just lost points this season; he’s lost momentum at moments when it mattered most. A Safety Car miscalculation at Silverstone destroyed a race that was in the palm of his hand, and the Montreal collision with teammate Piastri drove home the hazards of taking risks while leading a close championship.

McLaren’s “let them race” doctrine, so often lauded for its purity, has also placed Norris in the crucible, amplifying every error and stoking a drama worthy of the era’s best title fights.

What separates Norris from Piastri in 2025 isn’t talent or speed; it’s the capacity to harvest big points on the tough days and avoid calamity when the stars don’t align. His surprise upset victory in Hungary could well mark a changing of the times, but if Piastri takes over and begins to dominate the championship once again, Norris' critics will only grow louder.

Not all disappointment in F1 is the same. Sometimes, it comes laced with cruel irony, as with Lewis Hamilton’s 2025 odyssey in Ferrari red—a move that was supposed to cement legacy, ignite Maranello, and add a new chapter to the annals of sporting greatness.

Instead, Hamilton’s campaign has felt like a slow-motion ache: 14 races, zero podiums, and a relentless comparison with Charles Leclerc, who has danced the same car to the champagne stage five times already.

For Hamilton, the SF-25 has been less a thoroughbred and more a puzzle box—brake instability, rear-end unpredictability in traffic, and a window of performance so fickle it has driven the seven-time champion to new depths of self-critique.

“Absolutely useless,” he muttered after Hungary—words that, in their bleakness, felt more damning than any online meme. Ferrari’s engineers, dissecting data late into Italian nights, are searching for a balance that reconnects Hamilton with the sensations that have defined his career: faith in the front, confidence under deceleration, clarity in strategy.

He is, now more than ever, a study in contrasts: a global icon wrestling with mechanical gremlins and the weight of Ferrari’s hopes. The solution? It’s part software update, part soul-searching. Qualifying authority must return—because nothing ruins a Sunday at Maranello faster than starting 8th and feeling the soft tires wilt as you claw through the midfield.

But in F1, redemption is seldom more than a weekend or two away. A flawless pole. A slice of luck. A strategy call that finally lands. Until that day, however, the world watches, waiting for the king to reclaim his throne.

Ambition cuts both ways in Formula 1. Yuki Tsunoda’s jump to Red Bull just three races into the season was expected to be the last step in his transformation from prospect to force.

Instead, the climb has exposed fissures, and the numbers are now brick-and-mortar: seven consecutive races with no points, a haunting P18 in the championship, and weekends in Monaco and Hungary where P17 felt like sentences, not statistics.

To make matters even worse for the Japanese driver, teammate Max Verstappen has managed two wins so far this season and racked up an impressive 187 points to sit third in the championship, 177 more points than Tsunoda. It would be a shocker if he were to remain with Red Bull beyond the end of the 2025 season.