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Screen Time: F1 2025 Intro

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That’s the look of one proud father

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Well, how do you like the second practice? I would like to make a reservation right away - firstly, it is only Friday and different engine modes, different fuel loads, etc. Secondly, this is a specific Melbourne. Thirdly, it is only the start of the season, so it is more difficult for the teams to get into the right settings.

Therefore, all the conclusions below are preliminary, careful, etc.

McLaren is fine, but Norris was not lying: Ferrari is close, at least Leclerc. How symptomatic is Hamilton's lag behind his teammate, we will see.

Racing Bulls shot up, and Aston is not as bad as expected. And even Hulk produced another miracle lap. In general, the uprising of outsiders, but I repeat once again: this is Friday on a specific track.

It's a pity we did not see Sainz's lap on the "soft" - on the "medium" he was really good, in the group of leaders.

The Red Bull car is still nervous, as evidenced by both Max's mistakes and Lawson's 17th place.

Mercedes is not encouraging either. The heat - and the car stopped working? Again, we are not getting ahead of ourselves, we are just watching for now.

We are not burying Haas yet - they were usually modest on Fridays, and here they had to work with one car because of Berman's crash.

That's how things are. What do you think?

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Interesting data on sectors: "Red Bull" does not drive at all on the first, but on the second it is inferior only to... "Alpine".

The second sector is essentially a curving straight, so the French are doing well with the maximum speed/frontal/engine mode, but they still need to work on the rest.

Leclerc and two "McLarens" are very stable in sectors - that's what it means, there is a balance. Well, Hamilton fell behind on the straight. Maybe there was a glitch with DRS or something else.

Tsunoda is the best on the first sector - I can't explain it yet, but it's interesting, isn't it?)

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And a bit of detail

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[jkoral]

https://www.planetf1.com/sponsored/f...ed-2025-season
Anyone upgrading to the "F1 TV Premium: The all-new ‘fully immersive’ fan viewing experience"?

I have F1 TV Pro, it just renewed for $85/year. Looks cool, but not sure worth $130/year.

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🇦🇺 Australian Grand Prix 2025 Qualifying Results

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Traditional visualization of qualifying gaps. And Lando Norris waved goodbye to Max Verstappen.

But I wonder how the first lap after the start will go? 🤔

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Australian Race Start Grid🇦🇺

🕢 Race: Tomorrow morning at

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Q1-Q2-Q3

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Formula 1 did NOT change the start time of the 2025 Australian Grand Prix.

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🇦🇺 2025 Australian Grand Prix Results

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Pirelli put up a tyre change sign in Australia, and here's what we see on it:

The top of the standings are all the drivers who didn't wait for the safety car to come out to change to inters, but did so as soon as it started to rain.
Verstappen only came in on lap 46, and we remember how Lambiaso kept telling him to come in and then stay on the track. In my opinion, this was the decisive moment in his failure to win.
It was calculated that on average, a driver on slicks lost about five seconds per lap compared to drivers on intermediates.

Ferrari and Tsunoda stopped on lap 47. And this deprived some of the high places, and Tsunoda completely fell out of the points.

What is also important to note here, which was not mentioned, is that the decision to pit BEFORE the safety car was also influenced by the very short pit lane. Thus, the pit stop under the SC did not give such a big time gain.

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Oscar Piastri explained how he managed to get back on track after going into the grass:

"I spent some time at Jeremy Clarkson's farm trying to learn how to reverse the tractor. It really came in handy today."

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UPDATED after Antonelli's penalty reversal

Here's how the top ten stack up in the drivers' championship




Following Antonelli's promotion to P4, this is how the constructors stack up 👀

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Albon...obviously feeling fortunate he's connected with a team and a teammate that back him (finally).

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Opening betting lines for the Chinese GP and current lines for the Drivers Championship and the Contructors Championship.

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[Artemis]

Max Verstappen to leave Red Bull? The potential F1 2026 domino effect
https://www.planetf1.com/features/ch...25-conclusions

If his second place in Australia owed much to Max’s genius at exploiting the variables, the first routine race of 2025 in dry conditions at a more conventional (albeit extremely front-limited) circuit offered a more accurate indication of where Red Bull really stand at the start of this season.
And if this is how it’s going to be in 2025, Verstappen cast adrift from the leaders to the point of anonymity for most of the race, his loyalty to Red Bull – without a title on the line to hold them together this time – is going to be tested like never before.
For if there is anything we have learned about Max Verstappen over the years, it is that his competitive spirit will not allow him to tolerate a period of underperformance for any longer than he has to.
A race in which he is not competing for victory is merely a wasted afternoon.
A wasted year? Now that’s just inconceivable. Especially after all the success he’s become accustomed to recently.
If this is starting to sound a little bit like Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes post-2021, a once-irresistible team/driver combination struggling to recapture the old magic no matter what they try, that’s because it is.
Only with a considerably shorter fuse.
Having spent the early years of his career helping build Red Bull into a title-winning force, Verstappen will surely not hang around to witness the fall.
And his regular warnings that he is likely to retire young do not suggest that this is someone willing to invest time in building another project, either again with Red Bull or elsewhere.
Time is short. He wants to win and win now. Or get back to winning at the earliest conceivable opportunity.
So expect to hear more about this much-discussed performance clause in Max’s contract if weekends like this threaten to become a pattern and F1’s 2026 season of change edges ever closer.
That an exit clause exists is beyond doubt, ever since Christian Horner told media including PlanetF1.com as long ago as last year’s Dutch Grand Prix that Verstappen’s deal contains a “performance element.”
The precise details of this clause are less certain, although a newspaper report towards the end of last year claimed that Verstappen will be free to leave Red Bull at the end of 2025 if he is lower than third in the drivers’ championship after a significant portion of the season has been completed.
If true, that would appear to mirror an arrangement widely reported to have been included in at least one of Verstappen’s previous Red Bull contracts.
So let’s for a moment assume that it is true and that the ‘significant portion of the season’ bit refers, as clauses of this nature often do, to the summer break.
Until now it was unthinkable that Verstappen, the dominant World Champion of the last few years, would be lower than third in the standings after the Belgian Grand Prix, the final race before the summer break at the end of July.
Yet if China is a sign of things to come, with the McLarens over the hill and far away and George Russell leading a rejuvenated Mercedes, it is not so difficult to envisage the circumstances of Red Bull’s worst nightmare falling into place.
That’s the same George Russell, by the way, who with his own contract expiring at the end of this season would almost certainly be the driver replaced if Max chooses Mercedes as his next destination.
The same George Russell who, after being spotted having a very public conversation with McLaren’s hierarchy in the paddock in Melbourne, was pictured embracing Flavio Briatore of Alpine this weekend.
Coincidence?
Maybe Slideshow George knows something we don’t know…

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[Artemis]

"Martin Brundle: Racing with Senna and Schumacher" (May 2024) (41:55):

From 35:55 onwards Brundle describes his dream team: Newey + Verstappen and predicts that RBR will also lose Verstappen:
"There's two people you have to have if I was bringing the 'Brundle GP' and that would be Max Verstappen and Adrian Newey. Red Bull got them both but they just lost one and they will lose the other one."