We may be 19 rounds into the final year of this Formula 1 regulation cycle, but the 2025 season is still producing plenty of fresh talking points.
Here’s what we learned from the Austin weekend.
McLaren needs a big title reset
McLaren's gone from dominating F1 races to dominating the headlines recently, with the eve of the weekend taken up by speculation of what the "consequences" dished out to Lando Norris for his Singapore Grand Prix clash with Oscar Piastri were.
That was followed by those consequences potentially costing Norris pole in sprint qualifying, then, of course, the big Norris-Piastri clash in the sprint race, and later Piastri slumping to fifth in the grand prix while Norris just beat Charles Leclerc to second place.
The sprint clash was messy all round. Whether it was Zak Brown blaming Nico Hulkenberg - something he'd later directly apologise to both Sauber and Hulkenberg for - or the fact that it cost the team valuable race pace data, which compromised its grand prix performance.
McLaren has a lot to review after this weekend. It needs to consider which driver was at fault for that sprint clash, where it has lost ground to Red Bull and why Piastri in particular was struggling for performance.
The team is in real need of a reset, but there are only a few days before the Mexican GP, where a repeat of the United States GP result would move Verstappen one race win's worth of points shy of Piastri's points lead.
As team boss Andrea Stella pointed out, the title is still in McLaren's hands, but it will only remain that way if lessons are properly learned (and acted on) after a properly bruising weekend. - Josh Suttill
Even Verstappen finally thinks he's a title contender
Nobody has been less keen to talk about a 2025 Max Verstappen title shot than Verstappen himself, but even he acknowledged on Sunday that it's game-on.
You could already argue after Baku and Singapore that Verstappen was a tantalising title outsider, but now he can't be considered anything but a serious one.
Verstappen and Red Bull have excelled - and beaten McLaren - at four very different circuits in a row, meaning there's little reason to believe it can't be a win threat in each of the remaining five weekends.
Team boss Laurent Mekies felt Red Bull has the confirmation it needed and has categorically removed much of the early-season deficit.
He said: "We certainly feel that we have cancelled out a large part of the deficit we had in the first part of the season. And now it's down to the last details."
That 40-point gap still means winning every race won't guarantee Verstappen the title if Piastri finishes second in all of them. But Norris keeps getting in between them, and there are some interloping Ferrari or Mercedes cars that could help Verstappen take out further big chunks. - JS
Colapinto's 'disappointed' Alpine
Franco Colapinto has been making a good case lately to retain his Alpine F1 seat for 2026 and get the nod in what The Race previously revealed to be a two-horse race with Paul Aron to be Pierre Gasly's team-mate next year.
And at Austin, Colapinto was having a decently strong race, making the most of a tyre offset to catch and pressure Gasly.
But Alpine tried to call him off as, even though it was only for 17th place, the team was worried its drivers would run out of fuel - they needed to go slowly enough to be lapped by leader Verstappen so they didn't have to complete lap 56.
Colapinto ignored this request, passing Gasly on lap 53. He was lapped anyway and both drivers got to the finish, but Alpine wasn't impressed.
Colapinto was privately told what he did was not correct and was publicly criticised in the team's post-race press release.
Alpine managing director Steve Nielsen said "any instruction made by the pitwall is final and today we are disappointed that this didn't happen so it's something we will review and deal with internally".
Colapinto insisted after the race that it was "probably best to have me in front", otherwise both cars would have been overtaken by Gabriel Bortoleto's Sauber - in the end, only Gasly was.
But clearly that's no comfort for Alpine given its description of Colapinto's insubordination. - JS
Still post-Horner Red Bull vs McLaren needle
McLaren vs the new Red Bull (post-Christian Horner) is becoming a much more interesting fight beyond just the championship battle.
Red Bull got a hefty fine for what turned out to be a team member going back through the gap in the pitwall after the formation lap started – to try to remove tape from the pitwall that McLaren placed to help Norris find his grid slot.
This is a tried and tested tactic from McLaren and, it turns out, is not the first time Red Bull's tried to interfere. There's nothing against doing that in the rules but in sporting terms it's certainly a question mark, one that leaves McLaren feeling Red Bull still won't quite go about a fight in the right way.
That sets up a nice bit of needle, something that McLaren and post-Horner Red Bull had been keen to avoid in the pursuit of a more respectful rivalry. It makes this title run-in nicely multi-layered.
Red Bull is in the ascendancy on-track, no question, although Stella said this is no time to panic. McLaren could have won in the US, and in Singapore, and done a lot better in Azerbaijan - but it has underachieved as a collective.
So, while Red Bull has definitely made good progress and has a seriously competitive car on many circuits, McLaren hasn't been blown out of the water and shouldn't just be limping over the line.
It remains in control of this championship mathematically, but cannot afford to be rumbled by Red Bull: whether that's Verstappen's form on-track or any shenanigans pulled off it. - Scott Mitchell-Malm
Piastri has a specific weakness to address
By his own admission, Piastri had his second poor 2025 weekend at Austin after his Baku nightmare.
There wasn't the trio of mistakes like there was in Baku; probably just the one misjudgement at the start of the sprint. Instead Piastri just wasn't quick enough.
He was consistently missing two or three tenths to Norris all weekend in a way we've so rarely seen all season.
It's easy to wonder whether the championship pressure is playing its role, but Stella felt it's highlighting a specific weakness that Piastri needs to address.
"We are now in the process of checking that we are completely happy with the set-up of the car, the set-up of the floor, that everything is as intended from a car point of view, and at the same time we will be looking at the driving," Stella explained.
"We know with Oscar when the conditions are such that we have low grip, you really need to challenge the car, lean on this understeer, oversteer, locking - this is an area of his driving that he has an opportunity to improve.
"And in Oscar's standards, this will improve pretty fast."
Given low-grip conditions will inevitably resurface at some point in the title run-in, it's a weakness Piastri really has to address. - JS
Rivals think Tsunoda's getting desperate
Yuki Tsunoda took some big risks across the Austin weekend, and they didn't go unnoticed by other drivers on the grid.
Tsunoda was knocked out in SQ1 on Friday and Q2 on Saturday and, in a bid to recover positions in both races, Tsunoda took a big lunge into Turn 1.
It paid off handily in the sprint as Tsunoda shot from 18th to seventh - even after collecting Nico Hulkenberg's stricken Sauber front wing and carrying it for the majority of the lap.
That gave Tsunoda two points from a race that looked like a write-off after sprint qualifying and he repeated that seventh-place result on Sunday with another audacious opening lap move.
His defence against Ollie Bearman also grabbed the attention, with the Haas driver complaining Tsunoda moved under braking at the Turn 15 left-hander and calling that "dangerous" and "desperate" - claiming it projected the wrong image to up-and-coming karters.
Bearman had no desire to discuss things with Tsunoda because "it's not the first time he's done something like that, and it's definitely not going to be the last time".
"Clearly with the way he’s driving, we saw in quali, complaining [about Liam Lawson, who was baffled by Tsunoda's anger, and Pierre Gasly], he's trying really hard and it's not working. Twice in Turn 1 he dive-bombed in lap one, taking incredible risks."
You can understand why Tsunoda's taking those risks. The last thing he needed with his Red Bull seat slipping away was two disastrous qualifying sessions. Particularly if Red Bull is making its final decision for 2026 after next weekend's Mexican GP.
A ballsy couple of Turn 1 lunges could have ended in disaster but, instead, they were the foundation of Tsunoda getting something out of this weekend.
Even if a handful of points will do little to disguise the fact that Tsunoda still finished 52.714s adrift of Verstappen. - JS
Ferrari can still hope to finish second
With Red Bull's revival and Mercedes winning in Singapore, Ferrari faces a real fight to avoid finishing fourth, which would be its lowest finish in the constructors' championship since its disastrous 2020 F1 season.
But Austin at least showed some much-needed promise after a limp few rounds, with an impressive turnaround following the sprint.
Ferrari found itself back ahead of the Mercedes and with Piastri and Tsunoda's struggles, third and fourth places for Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton marked a proper overachievement.
We know this Ferrari has a very narrow sweet spot when it comes to its ride height and both drivers were having to do their usual lifting and coasting mid-race, but the post-sprint set-up tweaks Ferrari made - one would assume a riskier ride height - cleared paid off.
The fact that Hamilton was on or close to the pace of Leclerc throughout for arguably the fourth consecutive weekend is greatly encouraging, too. There are far fewer signs of the wild swings that were frustrating the first part of his Ferrari season.
Ferrari has the closest-matched team-mates of the three teams fighting for second place, so while Red Bull has the fastest car of that trio and will threaten for wins that don't look as achievable for Ferrari, at least Ferrari can bring home the points with both cars.
That could be enough to give Ferrari a fighting chance of somehow finishing second when it hasn't won a race. - JS
Bortoleto's had his first tough F1 weekend
The Austin weekend was the least impressive of Gabriel Bortoleo's short F1 career so far in terms of pace. He never showed comparable speed to team-mate Nico Hulkenberg and was eliminated in the first segment of both qualifying sessions before taking 11th and 18th in the sprint and grand prix respectively.
Most strikingly of all, he seemed completely at a loss to explain it. He's had bad results before, but it was his inability to find laptime that confused him on a weekend where his team-mate excelled.
"There was no [other] weekend that I've been off Nico in a way that I cannot find laptime," he said.
He also talked of myriad set-up changes as part of a fruitless search for a breakthrough and his struggle to understand the reasons for his difficulties. He pointed to something vague missing that's he called "not normal", but didn't explain what it was.
In what's been an impressive rookie campaign for Bortoleto, this weekend was an anomaly. But as team principal Jonathan Wheatley pointed out, he's in his first year, was racing at the Circuit of the Americas for the first time, and while the Sauber could be fast, it was still a "very tricky" car with a narrow window on a tricky circuit.
Bortoleto called it a tough weekend, and it's easy to see why. But given this is his 19th outing, it's impressive that it has taken him this long to endure an event where he really did seem to be out of ideas. - Edd Straw
