McLaren's five-race winning streak was snapped by Max Verstappen and Red Bull in Formula 1's 2025 Italian Grand Prix, but Verstappen's wasn't the only standout performance from a race that featured plenty of incident and controversy.
Here's our pick of F1's winners and losers from Monza.
Loser: McLaren (2nd & 3rd)
A decent result given this was a 'weak' track for 2025's dominant car, but McLaren opened up a can of worms with its team orders noise at Monza.
Lando Norris lost about four seconds to Oscar Piastri thanks to a slow left-front tyre change, which wasn't Piastri's fault - and yet the team swapped its drivers to give Norris second place over the championship leader.
The drivers stuck to the party line about principles and values post-race but it was evident over team radio that Piastri didn't know slow pitstops were part of the pre-agreed deal.
What constitutes a valid reason to swap position? McLaren might have put itself in a tough position concerning team orders that may well rear its ugly head later in the season.
Then there was Max Verstappen's unexpected dominance - something at which McLaren team principal Andrea Stella admitted his surprise after the race.
This wasn't the performance nor the controversy McLaren wanted. - Samarth Kanal
Winner: Max Verstappen (1st)
For all McLaren's dominance this season, it's hard to think of a 2025 win that's looked as nailed on so early in a race as Verstappen's victory at Monza did.
That, too, after letting Norris back through. And that, too, at the grand prix that marked Red Bull's nadir last year, as it grappled with increasingly problematic balance issues with its RB20.
Any hopes of muscling in on the title fight are long gone. But it's days like this when Verstappen and Red Bull remind us how formidable they are at the peak of their powers. - Jack Cozens
Loser: Ferrari (4th and 6th)
Ferrari found itself in no-man's land at home.
Charles Leclerc was fast enough to beat Mercedes' George Russell to fourth but could do nothing more without help from McLaren - which it did its level best to offer!
Lewis Hamilton was hampered by a grid penalty that had him starting 10th, and he managed to make up a few places, but he didn't fulfil his own objective of catching Russell.
Hamilton said it still feels "alien" to be driving the Ferrari, and that this will continue for the rest of 2025. It's proving a season to forget for him and the Scuderia. - SK
Winner: Alex Albon (7th)
Assisted by team orders? Perhaps. But this was another impressive drive that cemented Albon's status as best-of-the-rest in this year's ultra-tight midfield fight.
And actually, scratch that description - because seventh at Monza lifted him to seventh in the drivers' championship, clear of Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli.
A much more "comfortable" race than he expected, and "one of the best Sundays balance-wise I've had all year", adds up to a fourth points finish in five races for Albon - and a result that's made Williams's fifth position in the constructors' championship look more secure than it has for some time. - JC
Loser: Fernando Alonso (DNF)
Alonso performed heroics in getting the Aston Martin into Q3 on Saturday and that, combined with a good start and jumping Gabriel Bortoleto's Sauber in the pitstop phase, looked like the foundation for an unlikely points finish - one that might even have allowed Aston Martin to reduce its deficit to Williams in the constructors' championship.
Whether that would've been the case, or whether Albon would've come past him, is academic. A freak suspension failure over the kerb exiting Ascari, one Alonso said he'd used "every lap, basically" this weekend, put paid to any hopes of Aston Martin scoring points - as Lance Stroll never looked in contention at any stage during the weekend.
Alonso bemoaned that misfortune - "19 cars are OK" over that offending kerb - and said the improved performance of the AMR25 in this stretch of the season counted for little: "I need the points."
The frustration in his voice, at a juddering halt to his and the team's momentum, was obvious. - JC
Winner: Isack Hadjar (10th)
Not a podium finish, but a very solid drive from the pitlane to a point from Isack Hadjar on a circuit where Racing Bulls was nowhere near as strong as it was at Zandvoort.
While team-mate Liam Lawson got involved in a needless clash with Yuki Tsunoda, Hadjar stayed out of trouble and drove an effective, hard-medium one-stopper to leapfrog his way to 10th.
He managed to beat the incumbent second Red Bull driver by 17 seconds as he continues to strengthen his case to replace him for 2026. - Josh Suttill
Loser: Yuki Tsunoda (13th)
There was, perhaps, a two-lap window in this race where things were looking up for Tsunoda, as he momentarily closed in on Bortoleto and Alonso in the first stint while running ninth.
But that's a real clutching-at-straws positive, as the rest was dire. He was overtaken by Antonelli before his stop, then mugged into the della Roggia chicane by Ollie Bearman's Haas afterwards.
There was also the untidy battle with Liam Lawson as he struggled to overtake the driver he replaced at Red Bull, and Tsunoda's subsequent inability to pull away once ahead; and, of course, the non-existent pace basically all afternoon, much of which Tsunoda put down to damage caused by that robust interaction with Lawson.
All of that added up to an 80.7-second deficit to his team-mate - who just so happened to win the race.
If small crumbs of comfort had been taken from Tsunoda's recent performances, then this showing surely consigned them to the dustbin. - JC
Winner: Gabriel Bortoleto (8th)
Even without the slow pitstop, it's hard to see how Bortoleto would have beaten Albon's charging Williams, so eighth place - ahead of a Mercedes - feels like a big win for Bortoleto and Sauber, especially when you consider Sauber's painful no-score at Zandvoort while its rivals bagged big points.
Bortoleto has very quickly moved from 'promising rookie but too rough around the edges to bank points consistently' to one of the most dependable points scorers in the midfield, with four top-10 finishes in the last six grands prix. - JS
Loser: Kimi Antonelli (9th)
Even Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff - thus far a staunch defender of his teenaged rookie - admitted Antonelli was "underwhelming" in the Italian GP.
He'd qualified strongly, just 0.043s slower than team-mate George Russell, but much of that good work was undone by a slow race start.
Antonelli made amends with a pass on Tsunoda, but late on picked up a needless five-second time penalty for "erratic driving" while defending unsuccessfully from Albon, which cost Antonelli a place to Bortoleto's Sauber.
That left the Mercedes rookie ninth in a race where a seventh-place finish should have been the minimum.
Instead, Albon is now ahead of Antonelli in the best of the rest fight outside the top six that Antonelli should be well clear of. - JS
Loser: Nico Hulkenberg (DNS)
A hydraulic failure is a one-way ticket for Hulkenberg to be a 'loser' through no fault of his own.
Though he was starting on the mediums (in the end, starting on the hards looked like the faster strategy for those in the midfield) it's not impossible to believe he could have fought his way into the points from 12th on the grid.
But he never had a chance to make an attempt, on a weekend when he was otherwise again put in the shade by his outstanding rookie team-mate. - JS
Losers: Ollie Bearman + Carlos Sainz (11th + 12th)
Though the stewards judged Bearman to be at fault for their collision, both Bearman and Sainz are clear losers from the race, given their incident denied both of them any chance of a points finish.
Bearman's now the closest driver to an F1 race ban (just two penalty points away) while Sainz's tricky run of results continues and means he now has just one fifth of team-mate Albon's points total. - JS
